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NOW IT CAN BE 
TOLD 






Now It Can Be Told 



By 



Philip Qibbs 



Frontispiece 




HARPER &. BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 



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Now It Can Be Told 



Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published April, 1920 

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m -6 1920 



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CONTENTS 
Preface vii 

Part One 

PAGE 

Observers and Commanders . i 

Part Two 
The School of Courage 63 

Part Three 
The Nature of a Battle 149 

Part Four 
A Winter of Discontent . . . ' 203 

Part Five 
The Heart of a City . 285 

Part Six 
Psychology on the Somme 345 

Part Seven 
The Fields of Armageddon 447 

Part Eight 
For What Men Died 511 



PREFACE 

In this book I have written about some aspects of the 
war which, I beHeve, the world must know and remember, 
not only as a memorial of men's courage in tragic years, 
but as a warning of what will happen again — surely — if 
a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the hearts of 
peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only 
as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to 
soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same. 

What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, 
nor deny anything in my daily narratives of events on the 
western front as they are now pubhshed in book form. 
They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly, as a 
truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in 
France and Belgium during the years of war, broadly 
pictured out as far as I could see and know. My duty, 
then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why things 
should have happened so nor giving reasons why they 
should not happen so, but describing faithfully many of 
the things I saw, and narrating the facts as I found them, 
as far as the censorship would allow. After early, hostile 
days it allowed nearly all but criticism, protest, and of 
the figures of loss. 

The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth 
of this war and of all war — not by a more detailed narra- 
tive of events, but rather as the truth was revealed to the 
minds of men, in many aspects, out of their experience; 
and by a plain statement of realities, however painful, 
to add something to the world's knowledge out of which 
men of good-will may try to shape some new system of 
relationship between one people and another, some new 
code of international morality, preventing or at least 
postponing another massacre of youth like that five years' 
sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness. 



Part One 

OBSERVERS AND 
COMMANDERS 



NOW IT CAN BE 
TOLD 

OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 



WHEN Germany threw down her challenge to Rus- 
sia and France, and England knew that her 
Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German 
victory (the common people did not think this, at first, 
but saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on 
civilization, and a glorious adventure), some newspaper 
correspondents were sent out from London to report the 
proceedings, and I was one of them. 

We went in civilian clothes without military passports 
— ^the War Office was not giving any — ^with bags of money 
which might be necessary for the hire of motor-cars, 
hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the ante- 
chambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan 
War, and others. The Old Guard of war correspondents 
besieged the War Office for official recognition and were 
insulted day after day by junior staff-officers who knew 
that *'K" hated these men and thought the press ought 
to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into 
false hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them 
and were told to buy horses and sleepmg-bags and be 
ready to start at a moment's notice for the front. 

The moment's notice was postponed for months. . , . 

The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their 



4 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

chance of "seeing something," without authority, and 
made wild, desperate efforts to break through the barrier 
that had been put up against them by French and British 
staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were arrested, 
put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, 
rearrested, and expelled from France. That was after 
fantastic adventures in which they saw what war meant 
in civilized countries where vast populations were made 
fugitives of fear, where millions of women and children 
and old people became wanderers along the roads in 
a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind 
them and following them, and where the first battalions 
of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident 
of victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did 
not know), came back maimed and mangled and blinded 
and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently 
became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, 
swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and 
many fields. Those young writing-men who had set out 
in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a 
queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they 
had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen 
and could not understand. Because there was no code 
of words which would convey the picture of that wild 
agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized laws, to 
men and women who still thought of war in terms of 
heroic pageantry. 

"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corri- 
dor, hardly waiting for an answer. 

"A good time!" . . . God! . . . Did people think it 
was amusing to be an onlooker of world-tragedy? . . . 
One of them remembered a lady of France with a small boy 
who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and 
smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and 
bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her 
husband was in the battle that was now being fought 
round their own town. She was brave — pointed out the 
line of the German advance on the map — and it was in a 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 5 

troop-train crowded with French soldiers — and then burst 
into wild weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing- 
man so that her nails dug into his flesh. I remember her 
still. 

"Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!" said the 
boy of eight. 

Through Amiens at night had come a French army in 
retreat. There were dead and wounded on their wagons. 
Cuirassiers stumbled as they led their tired horses. 
Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in the 
darkness, stared at their men retreating like this 
through their city, and knew that the enemy was close 
behind. 

"Nous sommes perdus!" whispered a woman, and gave 
a wailing cry. 

People were fighting their way into railway trucks at 
every station for hundreds of miles across northern 
France. Women were beseeching a place for the sake 
of their babes. There was no food for them on journeys 
of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and 
hunger. An old woman died, and her corpse blocked up 
the lavatory. At night they slept on the pavements in 
cities invaded by fugitives. 

At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of 
France, there were columns of ambulances bringing in an 
endless tide of wounded. They were laid out stretcher 
by stretcher in station-yards, five hundred at a time. 
Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood. Some 
of their bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with 
a hard snuffle. A foul smell came from them. 

At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with 
disinfecting fluid after getting through with one day's 
wounded. The French doctor in charge had received a 
telegram from the director of medical services: "Make 
ready for forty thousand wounded." It was during the 
first battle of the Marne. 

"It is impossible!" said the French doctor. . . . 

Four hundred thousand people were in flight from 



6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Antwerp, into which big shells were falling, as English 
correspondents flattened themselves against the walls and 
said, "God in heaven!" Two hundred and fifty thousand 
people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats, sailing- 
craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no 
food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers 
had no milk in their breasts. It was cold at night and 
there were only a few canal-boats and fishermen's cot- 
tages, and in them were crowds of fugitives. The odor 
of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, 
and sicken in remembrance. ... 

Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many 
other towns from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. In 
Dixmude young boys of France — fusiliers marins — lay 
dead about the Grande Place. . In the Town Hall, falling 
to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting 
for death amid the dead bodies of his men — one so young, 
so handsome, lying there on his back, with a waxen face, 
staring steadily at the sky through the broken roof. . . . 

At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end 
of the esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled 
under the wall of a red-brick villa, w^atching other villas 
failing like card houses in a town that had been built 
for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the 
world. British monitors lying close into shore were 
answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport 
to the dunes by Ostend. From one monitor came a 
group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped 
with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the 
dead body of an officer tied up in a sack. . . . 

"O Jesu! , . . O maman! . . . O ma pauvre p'tite femme! 
. . . O Jesul O Jesu!" 

From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or 
parched in the burning sun before the battle of the 
Marne these cries went up to the blue sky of France in 
August of '14. They were the cries of youth's agony in 
war. Afterward I went across the fields where they 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 7 

fought and saw their bodies and their graves, and the 
proof of the victory that saved France and us. *[The 
German dead had been gathered into heaps hke autumn 
leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was 
rising from them. ... 

That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French 
retreat along all their line, and the thrust that drew very 
close to Paris, when I saw our little Regular Army, the 
"Old Contemptibles," on their way back, with the Ger- 
man hordes following close. Sir John French had his 
headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, 
Scottish soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some 
kind of order, were coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched 
with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags, with 
blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty 
as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had 
been retreating and retreating. A company of sappers 
had blown up forty bridges of France. Under a gas- 
lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of 
their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. 
*'Wait," they said. "In a few days we shall give them a 
hard knock. They will never get Paris, Jamais de la 



vie 



In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three 
English correspondents went there, after escape from 
Amiens, now in German hands. A tall cuirassier stood 
by some bags of gunpowder, ready to blow up the bridge. 
The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken 
bottles. ... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, 
except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway 
stations for escape and where French and British soldiers 
— stragglers all — drank together, and sang above their 
broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans. 

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in 
every month of that first six months of war — as after- 
ward — came back the tide of wounded; wounded every- 
where, maimed men at every junction; hospitals crowded 
with blind and dying and moaning men. . . . 



8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"Had an interesting time?" asked a man I wanted to 
kill because of his smug ignorance, his damnable indif- 
ference, his impregnable stupidity of cheerfulness in this 
world of agony. I had changed the clothes which were 
smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom 
I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to 
the surgeons. As an onlooker of war I hated the people 
who had not seen, because they could not understand. 
All these things I had seen in the first nine months I put 
down in a book called The Soul of the War^ so that some 
might know; but it was only a few who understood. . . . 



II 

In 191 5 the War Office at last moved in the matter of 
war correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against 
them, was being broken down a little by the pressure of 
public opinion (mentioned from time to time by members 
of the government), which demanded more news of their 
men in the field than was given by bald communiques 
from General Headquarters and by an "eye-witness" 
who, as one paper had the audacity to say, wrote nothing 
but "eye-wash." Even the enormous, impregnable stu- 
pidity of our High Command on all matters of psychology 
was penetrated by a vague notion that a few "writing 
fellows" might be sent out with permission to follow the 
armies in the field, under the strictest censorship, in 
order to silence the popular clamor for more news. 
Dimly and nervously they apprehended that in order to 
stimulate the recruiting of the New Army now being 
called to the colors by vulgar appeals to sentiment and 
passion, it might be well to "write up" the glorious side 
of war as it could be seen at the base and in the organiza- 
tion of transport, without, of course, any allusion to dead 
or dying men, to the ghastly failures of distinguished 
generals, or to the filth and horror of the battlefields. 
They could not understand, nor did they ever understand 
(these soldiers of the old school) that a nation which was 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 9 

sending all its sons to the field of honor desired with a 
deep and poignant craving to know how those boys of 
theirs were living and how they were dying, and what 
suffering was theirs, and what chances they had against 
their enemy, and how it was going with the war which 
was absorbing all the energy and wealth of the people 
at home. 

"Why don't they trust their leaders?" asked the army 
chiefs. "Why don't they leave it to us.f"' 

"We do trust you — with some misgivings," thought the 
people, "and we do leave it to you — though you seem to 
be making a mess of things — but we want to know what 
we have a right to know, and that is the life and progress 
of this war in which our men are engaged. We want to 
know more about their heroism, so that it shall be remem- 
bered by their people and known by the world; about 
their agony, so that we may share it in our hearts; and 
about the way of their death, so that our grief may be 
softened by the thought of their courage. We will not 
stand for this anonymous war; and you are wasting time 
by keeping it secret, because the imagination of those 
who have not joined cannot be fired by cold lines which 
say, 'There is nothing to report on the western front.' " 

In March of 19^15 I went out with the first body of 
accredited war correspondents, and we saw some of the 
bad places where our men lived and died, and the traffic 
to the lines, and the mechanism of war in fixed positions 
as were then estabhshed after the battle of the Marne 
and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an 
experimental visit. It was not until June of that year, 
after an adventure on the French front in the Champagne, 
that I received full credentials as a war correspondent 
with the British armies on the western front, and joined 
four other men who had been selected for this service, 
and began that long innings as an authorized onlooker of 
war which ended, after long and dreadful years, with the 
Army of Occupation beyond the Rhine. 



10 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

III 

In the very early days we lived in a small old house, 
called by courtesy a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, 
near General Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we 
shifted our quarters from time to time, according to the 
drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very peace- 
ful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant 
women worked while their men were fighting, but in the 
motor-cars supplied us by the army (with military drivers, 
all complete) it was a quick ride over Cassel Hill to the 
edge of the Ypres salient and the farthest point where 
any car could go without being seen by a watchful enemy 
and blown to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we 
walked, up sinister roads, or along communication 
trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or into places 
like "Plug Street" wood and Kemmel village, and the 
ruins of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle — the 
training-schools of British armies — where always birds of 
death were on the wing, screaming with high and rising 
notes before coming to earth with the cough that killed. 
. . . After hours in those hiding-places where boys of the 
New Army were learning the lessons of war in dugouts 
and ditches under the range of German guns, back again 
to the little white chateau at Tatinghem, with a sweet 
scent of flowers from the fields, and nightingales singing 
in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in the 
old church tower beyond our gate. 

"To-morrow," said the colonel — our first chief — before 
driving in for a late visit to G. H. Q., "we will go to 
Armentieres and see how the 'Kitchener' boys are shaping 
in the line up there. It ought to be interesting." 

The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic 
of war, in its organization of supplies and transport, and 
methods of command. He was a Regular of the Indian 
Army, a soldier by blood and caste and training, and the 
noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer, with 
obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS ii 

honor, I think, in small things as well as great, with a deep 
love of England, and a belief and pride in her Imperial 
destiny to govern many peoples for their own good, and 
with the narrowness of such belief. His imagination was 
limited to the boundaries of his professional interests, 
though now and then his humanity made him realize in a 
perplexed way greater issues at stake in this war than the 
challenge to British Empiry. 

One day, when we were walking through the desolation 
of a battlefield, with the smell of human corruption about 
us, and men crouched in chalky ditches below their 
breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a colleague of mine 
and said in a startled way: 

"This must never happen again! Never!" 
It will never happen again for him, as for many others. 
He was too tall for the trenches, and one day a German 
sniper saw the red glint of his hat-band — he was on the 
stafF of the nth Corps — and thought, "a gay bird"! 
So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were 
sad at his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been 
his body-servant, wept as he waited on us. 

• 
Late at night the colonel — that first chief of ours — 
used to come home from G. H. Q., as all men called General 
Headquarters with a sense of mystery, power, and inex- 
plicable industry accomplishing — ^what? — in those ini- 
tials. He came back with a cheery shout of, "Fine 
weather to-morrow!" or, "A starry night and all's well!" 
looking fine and soldierly as the glare of his headlights 
shone on his tall figure with red tabs and a colored armlet. 
But that cheeriness covered secret worries. Night after 
night, in those early weeks of our service, he sat in his 
little office, talking earnestly with the press officers — our 
censors. They seemed to be arguing, debating, protest- 
ing, about secret influences and hostilities surrounding 
us and them. I could only guess what it was all about. 
It all seemed to make no difference to me when I sat 
down before pieces of blank paper to get down some kind 



12 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

of picture, some kind of impression, of a long day in places 
where I had been scared awhile because death was on the 
prowl in a noisy way and I had seen it pounce on human 
bodies. I knew that to-morrow I was going to another 
little peep-show of war, where I should hear the same 
noises. That talk downstairs, that worry about some 
mystery at G. H. Q. would make no difference to the Hfe 
or death of men, nor get rid of that coldness which came 
to me when men were being killed nearby. Why all 
that argument? 

It seemed that G, H. Q. — mysterious people in a 
mysterious place — were drawing up rules for war cor- 
respondence and censorship; altering rules made the day 
before, formulating new rules for to-morrow, estabhshing 
precedents, writing minutes, initialing reports with, 
"Passed to you," or, "I agree," written on the margin. 
The censors who lived with us and traveled with us and 
were our friends, and read what we wrote before the ink 
was dry, had to examine our screeds with microscopic 
eyes and with infinite remembrance of the thousand and 
one rules. Was it safe to mention the weather? Would 
that give any information to the enemy? Was it per- 
missible to describe the smell of chloride-of-lime in the 
trenches, or would that discourage recruiting? That 
description of the traffic on the roads of war, with trans- 
port wagons, gun-limbers, lorries, mules — how did that 
conflict with Rule No. 17a (or whatever it was) pro- 
hibiting all mention of movements of troops? 

One of the censors working late at night, with lines of 
worry on his forehead and little puckers about his eyes, 
turned to me with a queer laugh, one night in the early 
days. He was an Indian Civil Servant, and therefore, 
by every rule, a gentleman and a charming fellow. 

"You don't know what I am risking in passing your 
despatch! It's too good to spoil, but G. H. Q. will 
probably find that it conveys accurate information to the 
enemy about the offensive in 1925. I shall get the sack — 
and oh, the difference to me!" 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 13 

It appeared that G. H. Q. was nervous of us. They 
suggested that our private letters should be tested for 
writing in invisible ink between the lines. They were 
afraid that, either deliberately for some journalistic ad- 
vantage, or in sheer ignorance as "outsiders," we might 
hand information to the enemy about important secrets. 
Belonging to the old caste of army mind, they believed 
that war was the special prerogative of professional sol- 
diers, of which politicians and people should have no 
knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were 
hardly better than spies. 

The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in 
the moonlight, after a day up the line, where young men 
were living and dying in dirty ditches. I could see that 
he was worried, even angry. 

"Those people!" he said. 

"What people?" 

"G. H. Q." 

"Oh, Lord!" I groaned. "Again?" and looked across 
the fields of corn to the dark outline of a convent on the 
hill where young officers were learning the gentle art of 
killing by machine-guns before their turn came to be 
killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had 
seen that day — or yesterday was it? — kneeling on the 
fire-step of a trench, with his forehead against the 
parapet as though in prayer. . . . How sweet was 
the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star 
twinkled above the low flashes of gun-fire away there in 
the salient. 

"They want us to waste your time," said the officer. 
"Those were the very words used by the Chief of Intelli- 
gence — in writing which I have kept. * Waste their 
time!' . . . I'll be damned if I consider my work is to 
waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good 
fools see that this is not a professional adventure, like 
their other little wars; that the whole nation is in it, and 
that the nation demands to know what its men are 
doing? They have a right to know." 



14 NOW rr CAN UK J'OLD, 

IV 

Just at first — though not for lonp; — there was a touch 
of hostility against us among divisional and brigade staffs, 
of the Regulars, hut not of the New Army. They, too, 
suspected our motive in going to their quarters, wondered 
why we should come "spying around,'* trying to "see 
things." I was faintly conscious of this one day in those 
very early times, when with the officer who had been 
a ruler in India 1 went to a brigade headquarters of 
the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy nor 
pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with 
iieecy clouds in a blue sky. I'here was a long straight 
road leading to the village of Vermelles, with a crisscross 
of communication trenches on one side, and, on the other, 
fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned 
fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though 
this were Arcady in days of peace. It was not. The 
red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or so away, were sharply 
defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the quiver of 
sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted 
place. It was where the French had fought their way 
through gardens, walls, and houses in murderous battle, 
before leaving it for British troops to hold. Across it 
now came the whine of shells, and I saw that shrapnel 
bullets were kicking up the dust of a thousand yards 
down the straight road, following a small body of brown 
men whose tramp ot feet raised another cloud of dust, 
like smoke. They were the only representatives of hu- 
man life — besides ourselves — in this loneliness, though 
many men must have been in hiding somewhere. Then 
heavy *' crumps" burst in the fields where the sheep were 
browsing, across the way we had to go to the brigade 
headquarters. 

**How about it?" asked the captain with me. "I 
don't like crossing that field, in spite of the buttercups 
and daisies and the little frisky lambs.'* 

"I hate the idea of it," I said. 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 15 

Then we looked down the road at the little body of 
brown men. They were nearer now, and I could see the 
face of the officer leading them — a boy subaltern, rather 
pale though the sun was hot. He halted and saluted my 
companion. 

"The enemy seems to have sighted our dust, sir. His 
shrapnel is following up pretty closely. Would you advise 
me to put my men under cover, or carry on?" 

The captain hesitated. This was rather outside his 
sphere of influence. But the boyishness of the other 
officer asked for help. 

"My advice is to put your men into that ditch and keep 
them there until the strafe is over." Some shrapnel 
bullets whipped the sun-baked road as he spoke. 

"Very good, sir." 

The men sat in the ditch, with their packs against the 
bank, and wiped the sweat off their faces. They looked 
tired and dispirited, but not alarmed. 

In the fields behind them — our way — the 4.2's (four- 
point-twos) were busy plugging holes in the grass and 
flowers, rather deep holes, from which white smoke-clouds 
rose after explosive noises. 

"With a little careful strategy we might get through/' 
said the captain. "There's a general waiting for us, and 
I have noticed that generals are impatient fellows. Let's 
try our luck." 

We walked across the wild flowers, past the sheep, who 
only raised their heads in meek surprise when shells came 
with a shrill, intensifying snarl and burrowed up the 
earth about them. I noticed how loudly and sweetly 
the larks were singing up in the blue. Several horses lay 
dead, newly killed, with blood oozing about them, and 
their entrails smoking. We made a half-loop around 
them and then struck straight for the chateau which was 
the brigade headquarters. Neither of us spoke now. 
We were thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting 
to that red-brick house between the shells. It was just 
dependent on the coincidence of time and place. 



i6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall 
round the chateau garden and ran hard for the gateway. 
A shell had pitched quite close to them. One man 
laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he 
reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the out- 
houses, and there was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after 
an explosive crash. 

"It rather looks," said my companion, "as though the 
Germans knew there is a party on in that charming 
house.'* 

It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never 
good to go back before reaching one's objective. That 
was bad for the discipline of the courage that is just 
beyond fear. 

Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the 
chateau, and as we went in through the gateway a ser- 
geant made a quick jump for a barn as a shell burst 
somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two 
ways into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was 
then that I became dimly aware of hostility against me 
on the part of a number of officers in the front hall. The 
brigade staff was there, grouped under the banisters. I 
wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that the 
center of the house might have a better chance of escape 
than the rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from 
those things falling outside. 

It was the brigade major who asked our business. He 
was a tall, handsome young man of something over 
thirty, with the arrogance of a Christ Church blood. 

"Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? 
A pleasant place for sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is 
ranging on this house, so he may see more than he wants." 

He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all 
stared in my direction as though at a curious animal. 
A very young gentleman — the general's A. D. C. — made a 
funny remark at my expense and the others laughed. 
Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little 
study in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 17 

death. I was perfectly conscious myself that in a mo- 
ment or two some of us, perhaps all of us, might be in a 
pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a red-brick 
villa — the shells were crashing among the outhouses and 
in the courtyard, and the enemy was making good 
shooting — and the idea did not please me at all. At the 
back of my brain was Fear, and there was a cold sweat 
in the palms of my hands; but I was master of myself, 
and I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I 
had answered the brigade major in a level voice, with a 
touch of his own arrogance. I saw that these officers 
were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the back of the 
brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the 
camouflage of the soul. The face of the young A. D. C. 
was flushed and he laughed too much at his own jokes, 
and his laughter was just a tone too shrill. An officer 
came into the hall, carrying two Mills bombs — new toys 
in those days — and the others fell back from him, and 
one said: 

" For Christ's sake don't bring them here — in the middle 
of a bombardment ! " 

"Where's the general?" asked the newcomer. 

"Down in the cellar with the other brigadier. They 
don't ask us down to tea, I notice." 

Those last words caused all the officers to laugh — 
almost excessively. But their laughter ended sharply, 
and they listened intently as there was a heavy crash 
outside. 

Another officer came up the steps and made a rapid 
entry into the hall. 

"I understand there is to be a conference of battalion 
commanders," he said, with a queer catch in his breath. 
"In view of this — ^er — bombardment, I had better come 
in later, perhaps?" 

"You had better wait," said the brigade major, rather 
grimly. 

"Oh, certainly." 

A sergeant-major was pacing up and down the passage 



i8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

by the back door. He was calm and stolid. I liked the 
look of him and found something comforting in his 
presence, so that I went to have a few words with him. 

"How long is this likely to last, Sergeant-major?" 

"There's no saying, sir. They may be searching for 
the chateau to pass the time, so to speak, or they may go 
on till they get it. I'm sorry they caught those gunners. 
Nice lads, both of them." 

He did not seem to be worrying about his own chance. 

Then suddenly there was silence. The German guns 
had switched off. I heard the larks singing through the 
open doorway, and all the little sounds of a summer day. 
The group of officers in the hall started chatting more 
quietly. There was no more need of finding jokes and 
laughter. They had been reprieved, and could be 
serious. 

"We'd better get forward to Vermelles," said my 
companion. 

As we walked away from the chateau, the brigade 
major passed us on his horse. He leaned over his saddle 
toward me and said, j" Good day to you, and I hope you'll 
like Vermelles." 

The words were civil, but there was an underlying 
meaning in them. 

"I hope to do so, sir." 

We walked down the long straight road toward the 
ruins of Vermelles with a young soldier-guide who on the 
outskirts of the village remarked in a casual way: 

"No one is allowed along this road In daylight, as a 
rule. It's under hobservation of the henemy." 

"Then why the devil did you come this way?" asked 
my companion. 

"I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir." 

We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young 
Frenchmen had fallen in fighting through the walls and 
gardens. One could see the track of their strife, in tram- 
pled bushes and broken walls. Bits of red rag — the red 
pantaloons of the first French soldiers — ^were still fastened 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 19 

to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches, 
water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German 
stick-bombs littered the ditches which had been dug as 
trenches across streets of burned-out houses. 



A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, 
and stopped in front of the chateau of Vermelles, a big 
red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us 
the story of its capture. 

"It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a 
French sergeant who was in it. They were under the 
cover of that wall over there, about a hundred yards 
away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock 
a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun 
fortress, with the Germans on the top floor, the ground 
floor, and in the basement, protected by sand-bags, 
through which they fired. A German officer made a 
bad mistake. He opened the front door and came out 
with some of his machine-gunners from the ground floor 
to hold a trench across the square in front of the house. 
Instantly a French lieutenant called to his men. They 
climbed over the wall and made a dash for the chateau, 
bayoneting the Germans who tried to stop them. Then 
they swarmed into the chateau — a platoon of them with 
the lieutenant. They were in the drawing-room, quite 
an elegant place, you know, with the usual gilt furniture 
and long mirrors. In one corner was a pedestal, with a 
statue of Venus standing on it. Rather charming, I 
expect. A few Germans were killed in the room, easily. 
But upstairs there was a mob who fired down through thei 
ceiling when they found what had happened. The French 
soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all 
the plaster broke, falling on them. A German, fat and 
heavy, fell half-way through the rafters, and a bayonet 
was poked into him as he stuck there. The whole ceiling 
gave way, and the Germans upstairs came downstairs, in 



20 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

a heap. They fought like wolves — wild beasts — with fear 
and rage. French and Germans clawed at one another's 
throats, grabbed hold of noses, rolled over each other. 
The French sergeant told me he had his teeth into a 
German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning his 
arms, trying to choke him. It was the French lieutenant 
who did most damage. He fired his last shot and smashed 
a German's face with his empty revolver. Then he 
caught hold of the marble Venus by the legs and swung 
it above his head, in the old Berserker style, and laid out 
Germans like ninepins. . . . The fellows in the basement 
surrendered." 

VI 

The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, 
was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt 
furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when 
I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles 
of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The 
gunner officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some 
friends of his who had their battery nearby. We stum- 
bled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth 
to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and 
wire frames with immortelles remained as relics of that 
garden where the people of Vermelles had laid their dead 
to rest. New dead had followed old dead. I stumbled 
over something soft, like a ball of clay, and saw that it 
was the head of a faceless man, in a battered kepi. From 
a ditch close by came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh. 

"The whole place is a pest-house," said the gunner. 

Another voice spoke from some hiding-place. 

*' Salvo!" 

The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and 
a shock of noise which hurt one's ear-drums. 

"That's my battery," said the gunner officer. "It's 
the very devil when one doesn't expect it." 

I was introduced to the gentleman who had said 
"Salvo!" He was the gunner-major, and a charming 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 21 

fellow, recently from civil life. All the battery was 
made up of New Army men learning their job, and learning 
it very well, I should say. There was no arrogance 
about them. 

"It's sporting of you to come along to a spot like this," 
said one of them. "I wouldn't unless I had to. Of 
course you'll take tea in our mess?'* 

I was glad to take tea — in a little house at the end of 
the ruined high-street of Vermelles which had by some 
miracle escaped destruction, though a shell had pierced 
through the brick wall of the parlor and had failed to 
burst. It was there still, firmly wedged, like a huge nail. 
The tea was good, in tin mugs. Better still was the com- 
pany of the gunner officers. They told me how often 
they were "scared stiff." They had been very frightened 
an hour before I came, when the German gunners had 
ranged up and down the street, smashing up ruined 
houses into greater ruin. 

"They're so methodical!" said one of the officers. 

"Wonderful shooting!" said another. 

"I will say they're topping gunners," said the major. 
"But we're learning; my men are very keen. Put in a 
good word for the new artillery. It would buck them up 
no end." 

We went back before sunset, down the long straight 
road, and past the chateau which we had visited in the 
afternoon. It looked very peaceful there among the 
trees. 

It is curious that I remember the details of that day 
so vividly, as though they happened yesterday. On 
hundreds of other days I had adventures like that, which 
I remember more dimly. 

"That brigade major was a trifle haughty, don't you 
think?" said my companion. "And the others didn't 
seem very friendly. Not like those gunner boys." 

"We called at an awkward time. They were rather 
fussed." 

"One expects good manners. Especially from Regulars 



22 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

who pride themselves on being different in that way from 
the New Army." 

"It's the difference between the professional and the 
amateur soldier. The Regular crowd think the war 
belongs to them. . . . But I liked their pluck. They're 
arrogant to Death himself when he comes knocking at 
the door.'* 

VII 

It was not long before we broke down the prejudice 
against us among the fighting units. The new armies 
were our friends from the first, and liked us to visit them 
in their trenches and their dugouts, their camps and 
their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his 
particular *'peep-show" or to tell us his latest '^stunt." 
We made many friends among them, and it was our grief 
that as the war went on so many of them disappeared 
from their battalions, and old faces were replaced by new 
faces, and those again by others when they had become 
famihar. Again and again, after battle, twenty-two 
officers in a battalion mess were reduced to two or three, 
and the gaps were filled up from the reserve depots. I 
was afraid to ask, "Where is So-and-so?" because I knew 
that the best answer would be, "A Blighty wound," and 
the worst was more likely. 

It was the duration of all the drama of death that 
seared one's soul as an onlooker; the frightful sum of 
sacrifice that we were recording day by day. There 
were times when it became intolerable and agonizing, and 
when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace 
by negotiation, by compromise, that the river of blood 
might cease to flow. The men looked so splendid as 
they marched up to the lines, singing, whistling, with an 
easy swing. They looked so different when thousands 
came down again, to field dressing-stations — the walking 
wounded and the stretcher cases, the blind and the 
gassed— as we saw them on the mornings of battle, month 
after month, year after year. 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 23 

Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether 
**soft," though we did not go "over the top" or live in the 
dirty ditches with them. We had to travel prodigiously 
to cover the ground between one division and another 
along a hundred miles of front, with long walks often at 
the journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we 
were soaked to the skin on the journey home. Often we 
were so cold and numbed in those long wild drives up 
desolate roads that our limbs lost consciousness and the 
wind cut into us like knives. We were working against 
time, always against time, and another tire-burst would 
mean that no despatch could be written of a great battle 
on the British front, or only a short record written in the 
wildest haste when there v/as so much to tell, so much to 
describe, such unforgetable pictures in one's brain of 
another day's impressions in the fields and on the roads. 

There were five English correspondents and, two years 
later, two Americans. On mornings of big battle we di- 
vided up the line of front and drew lots for the particular 
section which each man would cover. Then before the 
dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first 
glimmer of a summer day, our cars would pull out and 
we would go off separately to the part of the line allotted 
to us by the number drawn, to see the preliminary bom- 
bardment, to walk over newly captured ground, to get 
into the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded, 
amid batteries firing a new barrage, guns moving forward 
on days of good advance, artillery transport bringing up 
new stores of ammunition, troops in support marching to 
repel a counter-attack or follow through the new ob- 
jectives, ambulances threading their way back through 
the traffic, with loads of prostrate men, mules, gun- 
horses, lorries churning up the mud in Flanders. 

So we gained a personal view of all this activity of 
strife, and from many men in its whirlpool details of their 
own adventure and of general progress or disaster on one 
sector of the battle-front. Then in divisional headquarters 
we saw the reports of the battle as they came in by tele- 



24 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

phone, or aircraft, or pigeon-post, from half-hour to half- 
hour, or ten minutes by ten minutes. Three divisions 
widely separated provided all the work one war cor- 
respondent could do on one day of action, and later news, 
on a broader scale, could be obtained from corps head- 
quarters farther back. Tired, hungry, nerve-racked, 
splashed to the eyes in mud, or covered in a mask of dust, 
we started for the journey back to our own quarters, 
which we shifted from time to time in order to get as near 
as we could to the latest battle-front without getting 
beyond reach of the telegraph instruments — by relays of 
despatch-riders — at "Signals," G. H. Q., which remained 
immovably fixed in the rear. 

There was a rendezvous in one of our rooms, and each 
man outlined the historical narrative of the day upon the 
front he had covered, reserving for himself his own 
adventures, impressions, and emotions. 

Time slipped away, and time was short, while the 
despatch-riders waited for our unwritten despatches, and 
censors who had been our fellow-travelers washed them- 
selves cleaner and kept an eye on the clock. 

Time was short while the world waited for our tales of 
tragedy or victory . . . and tempers were frayed, and 
nerves on edge, among five men who hated one another, 
sometimes, with a murderous hatred (though, otherwise, 
good comrades) and desired one another's death by slow 
torture or poison-gas when they fumbled over notes, 
written in a jolting car, or on a battlefield walk, and 
went into past history in order to explain present hap- 
penings, or became tangled in the numbers of battalions 
and divisions. 

Percival Phillips turned pink-and-white under the 
hideous strain of nervous control, with an hour and a half 
for two columns in The Morning Post. A little pulse 
throbbed in his forehead. His lips were tightly pressed. 
His oaths and his anguish were in his soul, but unuttered. 
Beach Thomas, the most amiable of men, the Peter Pan 
who went a bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 25 

and games and old poems and Greek and Latm tags, and 
all joy in life — what had he to do with war? — looked bored 
with an infinite boredom, irritable with a scornful im- 
patience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold- 
rimmed spectacles with an air of extreme detachment 
(when Percy Robinson rebuilt the map with dabs and 
dashes on a blank sheet of paper), and said, *'Vye got 
more than I can write, and The Daily Mail goes early 
to press.'* 

"Thanks very much. . . . It's very kind of you." 

We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously 
poHte. (Afterward we were the best of friends.) Thomas 
was first out of the room, with short, quick little steps in 
spite of his long legs. His door banged. Phillips was 
first at his typewriter, working it like a machine-gun, in 
short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my 
typewriter — a new instrument of torture to me — and 
coaxed its evil genius with conciliatory prayers. 

"For dear God's sake," I said, "don't go twisting that 
blasted ribbon of yours to-day. I must write this 
despatch, and I've just an hour when I want five." 

Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular 
sweetness, and I blessed it with a benediction. But 
often there was a devil in it which mocked at me. After 
tLe first sentence or two it twisted the ribbon; at the 
end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry 
snake, writhing and coiling hideously. 

I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of 
these things. 

He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of 
anguish, my crise de nerfs. I could see by his eyes that 
he understood my stress and had pity on me. 

"That's all right," he said. "A little patience — " 

By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and 
said: "Go easy. You've just about reached breaking- 
point." 

I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down 
something of enormous history, word-pictures of things 



26 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

seen, heroic anecdotes, the underlying meaning of this 
new slaughter. There was never time to think out a 
sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph, to 
go back on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, 
to put a touch of style into one's narrative. One wrote 
instinctively, blindly, feverishly. . . . And downstairs 
were the censors, sending up messages by orderlies to say 
''half-time," or "ten minutes more," and cutting out 
sometimes the things one wanted most to say, modifying 
a direct statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking 
away the honor due to the heroic men who had fought 
and died to-day. . . . Who would be a war correspondent, 
or a censor? 

So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, 
when big battles were in progress. It was not an easy 
life. There were times when I was so physically and 
mentally exhausted that I could hardly rouse myself to a 
new day's effort. There were times when I was faint and 
sick and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But 
we struggled on to tell the daily history of the war and 
the public cursed us because we did not tell more, or 
sneered at us because they thought we were "spoon-fed'* 
by G. H. Q. — ^who never gave us any news and who were 
far from our way of life, except when they thwarted us, 
by petty restrictions and foolish rules. 

VIII 

The Commander-in-Chief — Sir John French — received 
us when we were first attached to the British arpiies in 
the field — a lifetime ago, as it seems to me now. It was 
j a formal ceremony in the chateau near St.-Omer, which 
he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s in 
attendance, though the main general headquarters were 
in the town. Our first colonel gathered us like a shep- 
herd with his flock, counting us twice over before we 
passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew after- 
ward to be Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 27 

pleasantly in a French salon with folding-doors which 
shut off an inner room. There were a few portraits of 
ladies and gentlemen of France in the days before the 
Revolution, like those belonging to that old aristocracy 
which still existed, in poverty and pride, in other chateaus 
in this French Flanders. There was a, bouquet of flowers 
on the table, giving a sweet scent to the room, and sunlight 
streamed through the shutters. ... I thought for a 
moment of the men living in ditches in the salient, under 
harassing fire by day and night. Their actions and their 
encounters with death were being arranged, without th^ir 
knowledge, in this sunny little chateau. . . . 

The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came 
in. He wore top-boots and spurs, and after saying, *'Good 
day, gentlemen," stood with hisTegs apart, a stocky, sol- 
dierly figure, with a square head and heavy jaw. I 
wondered whether there were any light of genius in him — 
any inspiration, any force which would break the awful 
strength of the enemy against us, any cunning in modern 
warfare. 

He coughed a little, and made us a speech. I forget 
his words, but remember the gist of them. He was 
pleased to welcome us within his army, and trusted to our 
honor and loyalty. He made an allusion to the power of 
the press, and promised us facilities for seeing and writing, 
within the bounds of censorship. I noticed that he pro- 
nounced St.-Omer, St.-Omar, as though Omar Khayyam 
had been canonized. He said, "Good day, gentlemen," 
again, and coughed huskily again to clear his throat, and 
then went back through the folding-doors. 

I saw him later, during the battle of Loos, after its 
ghastly failure. He was riding a white horse in the vil- 
lages of Heuchin and Houdain, through which lightly 
wounded Scots of the 1st and 15th Divisions were making 
their way back. He leaned over his saddle, questioning 
the men and thanking them for their gallantry. I 
thought he looked grayer and older than when he had 
addressed us. I 



28 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"Who mun that old geezer be, Jock?" asked a High- 
lander when he had passed. 

*'I dinna ken," said the other Scot. "An' I dinna care." 

"It's the Commander-in-Chief," I said. "Sir John 
French.'" 

" Eh ? " said the younger man, of the 8th Gordons. He 
did not seem thrilled by the knowledge I had given him, 
but turned his head and stared after the figure on the 
white horse. Then he said: "Well, he's made a mess o' 
the battle. We could 've held Hill 70 against all the 
di'els o' hell if there had bin supports behind us." 

"Ay," said his comrade, " an' there's few o' the laddies 'II 
come back fra Cite St.-Auguste." 

IX 

It was another commander-in-chief who received us 
some months after the battle of Loos, in a chateau near 
Montreuil, to which G. H. Q. had then removed. Our 
only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before that day was 
of a hostile influence against us in the First Army, which 
he commanded. He had drawn a line through his area 
beyond which we might not pass. He did not desire our 
presence among his troops nor in his neighborhood. 
That line had been broken by the protests of our com- 
mandant, and now as Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas 
Haig had realized dimly that he might be helped by our 
services. 

It was in another French salon that we waited for the 
man who controlled the British armies in the field — 
those armies which we now knew in some intimacy, whom 
we had seen in the front-line trenches and rest-camps and 
billets, hearing their point of view, knowing their suffering 
and their patience, and their impatience — and their 
deadly hatred of G. H. Q. 

He was very handsome as he sat behind a Louis XIV 
table, with General Charteris — his Chief of Intelligence, 
who was our chief, too — behind him at one side, for 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 29 

prompting and advice. He received us with fine courtesy 
and said: 

"Pray be seated, gentlemen." 

There had been many troubles over censorship, of 
which he knew but vaguely through General Charteris, 
who looked upon us as his special "cross." We had 
fought hard for liberty in mentioning units, to give the 
honor to the troops, and for other concessions which 
would free our pens. 

The Commander-in-Chief was sympathetic, but his 
sympathy was expressed in words which revealed a com- 
plete misunderstanding of our purpose and of our work, 
and was indeed no less than an insult, unconscious but 
very hurtful. 

"I think I understand fairly well what you gentlemen 
want," he said. "You want to get hold of little stories of 
heroism, and so forth, and to write them up in a bright 
way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen, 
and the Man in the Street." The quiet passion with 
which those words were resented by us, the quick repudi- 
ation of this slur upon our purpose by a charming man, 
perfectly ignorant at that time of the new psychology of 
nations in a war which was no longer a professional ad- 
venture, surprised him. We took occasion to point out 
to him that the British Empire, which had sent its men 
into this war, yearned to know what they were doing and 
how they were doing, and that their patience and loyalty 
depended upon closer knowledge of what was happening 
than was told them in the communiques issued by the 
Commander-in-Chief himself. We urged him to let us 
mention more frequently the names of the troops engaged 
■ — especially English troops — for the sake of the soldiers 
themselves, who were discouraged by this lack of recog- 
nition, and for the sake of the people behind them. . . . 
It was to the pressure of the war correspondents, very 
largely, that the troops owed the mention and world-wide 
honor which came to them, more generously, in the later 
phases of the war. 



30 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

The Commander-in-Chief made a note of our griev- 
ances, turning now and again to General Charteris, who 
was extremely nervous at our frankness of speech, and 
telling him to relax the rules of censorship as far as pos- 
sible. That was done, and in later stages of the war I 
personally had no great complaint against the censorship, 
and wrote all that was possible to write of the actions day 
by day, though I had to leave out something of the under- 
lying horror of them all, in spite of my continual emphasis, 
by temperament and by conviction, on the tragedy of all 
this sacrifice of youth. The only alternative to what we 
wrote would have been a passionate denunciation of all 
this ghastly slaughter and violent attacks on British 
generalship. Even now I do not think that would have 
been justified. As Bernard Shaw told me, "while the war 
lasts one must put one's own soul under censorship." 

After many bloody battles had been fought we were 
received again by the Commander-in-Chief, and this time 
his cordiality was not marred by any slighting touch. 

** Gentlemen," he said, "you have played the game like 
men! 

When victory came at last — at last! — after the years 
of slaughter, it was the little band of war correspondents 
on the British front, our foreign comrades included, whom 
the Field-Marshal addressed on his first visit to the Rhine. 
We stood on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, watched 
by groups of Germans peering through the escort of 
Lancers. It was a dank and foul day, but to us beautiful, 
because this was the end of the long journey — four-and- 
a-half years long, which had been filled with slaughter all 
the way, so that we were tired of its backwash of agony, 
which had overwhelmed our souls — ^mine, certainly. The 
Commander-in-Chief read out a speech to us, thanking 
us for our services, which, he said, had helped him to 
victory, because we had heartened the troops and the 
people by our work. It was a recognition by the leader 
of our armies that, as chroniclers of war, we had been a 
spiritual force behind his arms. It was a reward for 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 31 

many mournful days, for much agony of spirit, for hours 
of danger — some of us had walked often in the ways of 
death — and for exhausting labors which we did so that 
the world might know what British soldiers had been 
doing and suffering. 

X 

I came to know General Headquarters more closely 
when it removed, for fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old 
walled town, once within sight of the sea, which ebbed 
over the low-lying ground below its hill, but now looking 
across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many 
hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came 
to G. H. Q. from journeys over the wild desert of the 
battlefields, where men lived in ditches and "pill-boxes," 
muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as to a place 
where the pageantry of war still maintained its old and 
dead tradition. It was like one of those pageants which 
used to be played in England before the war — picturesque, 
romantic, utterly unreal. It was as though men were 
playing at war here, while others sixty miles away were 
fighting and dying, in mud and gas-waves and explosive 
barrages. 

An "open sesame," oy means of a special pass, was 
needed to enter this City of Beautiful Nonsense, Below 
the gateway, up the steep hillside, sentries stood at a 
white post across the road, which lifted up on pulleys 
when the pass had been examined by a military policeman 
in a red cap. Then the sentries slapped their hands on 
their rifles to the occupants of any motor-car, sure that 
more staff-officers were going in to perform those duties 
which no private soldier could attempt to understand, 
believing they belonged to such mysteries as those of God. 
Through the narrow streets walked elderly generals, mid- 
dle-aged colonels and majors, youthful subalterns all wear- 
ing red hat-bands, red tabs, and the blue-and-red armlet 
of G. H. Q., so that color went with them on their way. 

Often one saw the Commander-in-Chief starting for an 



32 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

afternoon ride, a fine figure, nobly mounted, with two 
A. D. C.'s and an escort of Lancers. A pretty sight, with 
fluttering pennons on all their lances, and horses groomed 
to the last hair. It was prettier than the real thing up 
in the salient or beyond the Somme, where dead bodies 
lay in upheaved earth among ruins and slaughtered trees. 
War at Montreuil was quite a pleasant occupation for 
elderly generals who liked their little stroll after lunch, 
and for young Regular officers, released from the painful 
necessity of dying for their country, who were glad to get 
a game of tennis, down below the walls there, after stren- 
uous office-work in which they had written ''Passed to 
you" on many "minutes," or had drawn the most comical 
caricatures of their immediate chief, and of his immediate 
chief, on blotting-pads and writing-blocks. 

It seemed, at a mere glance, that all these military in- 
habitants of G, H. Q, were great and glorious soldiers. 
Some of the youngest of them had a row of decorations 
from Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, and other 
states, as recognition of gallant service in translating 
German letters (found in dugouts by the fighting-men), 
or arranging for visits of political personages to the back 
areas of war, or initialing requisitions for pink, blue, 
green, and yellow forms, which in due course would find 
their way to battalion adjutants for immediate fiUing-up 
in the middle of an action. The oldest of them, those 
white-haired, bronze-faced, gray-eyed generals in the ad- 
ministrative side of war, had started their third row of 
ribbons well before the end of the Somme battles, and 
had flower-borders on their breasts by the time the mas- 
sacres had been accomplished in the fields of Flanders. 
I know an officer who was awarded the D. S. O. because 
he had hindered the work of war correspondents with the 
zeal of a hedge-sparrow in search of worms, and another 
who was the best-decorated man in the army because he 
had presided over a visitors' chateau and entertained 
Royalties, Members of Parliament, Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
miners, Japanese, Russian revolutionaries, Portuguese 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 33 

ministers, Harry Lauder, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, 
clergymen, Montenegrins, and the Editor of John Bull, 
at the government's expense — and I am bound to say he 
deserved them all, being a man of infinite tact, many lan- 
guages, and a devastating sense of humor. There was 
always a Charlie Chaplin film between moving pictures 
of the battles of the Somme. He brought the actualities 
of war to the visitors' chateau by sentry-boxes outside the 
door, a toy ''tank" in the front garden, and a collection 
of war trophies in the hall. He spoke to High Personages 
with less deference than he showed to miners from Dur- 
ham and Wales, and was master of them always, ordering 
them sternly to bed at ten o'clock (when he sat down to 
bridge with his junior officers), and with strict military 
discipline insisting upon their inspection of the bakeries at 
Boulogne, and boot-mending factories at Calais, as part 
of the glory of war which they had come out for to see. 

So it was that there were brilliant colors in the streets 
of Montreuil, and at every doorway a sentry slapped his 
hand to his rifle, with smart and untiring iteration, as the 
"brains" of the army, under "brass hats" and red bands, 
went hither and thither in the town, looking stern, as 
soldiers of grave responsibility, answering salutes absent- 
mindedly, staring haughtily at young battalion officers 
who passed through Montreuil and looked meekly for a 
chance of a lorry-ride to Boulogne, on seven days' leave 
from the lines. 

The smart society of G. H. Q. was best seen at the 
Officers' Club in Montreuil, at dinner-time. It was as 
much like musical comedy as any stage setting of war at 
the Gaiety. A band played ragtime and light music 
while the warriors fed, and all these generals and staff- 
officers, with their decorations and arm-bands and pol- 
ished buttons and crossed swords, were waited upon by 
little W. A. A. C.'s with the G. H. Q. colors tied up in 
bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under their short 
skirts and fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts 
of Hght-hearted laughter! Such whisp^ings of secrets 



S4 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

and intrigues and scandals in high places! Such careless- 
hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown 
to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in 
places that were far — so very far — from G. _H. Q. ! 



XI 

There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate 
of our quarters — ^women's voices, excited, angry, passion- 
ate. An orderly came into the mess — ^we were at break- 
fast — and explained the meaning of the clamor, which by 
some intuition and a quick ear for French he had gathered 
from all this confusion of tongues. 

"There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has 
been attacking a girl. The villagers want an officer to 
arrest him." 

The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. 
"Tell three orderlies to follow me." 

We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded 
round us with a story of attempted violence against an 
innocent girl. The man had been drinking last night at 
the estaminet up there. Then he had followed the girl, 
trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself 
in the room, when he tried to climb through the window. 

"If you don't come out I'll get in and kill you," he said, 
according to the women. 

But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all 
night. Now he was hiding in an outhouse. The brute! 
The pig! 

When we went up the road the man was standing in the 
center of it, with a sullen look. 

"What's the trouble?" he asked. "It looks as if all 
France were out to grab me." 

He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning 
his chance of escape. There was no chance. 

The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched 
back between the orderlies, with an old soldier of the 
Contemptibles behind him. 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 35 

Later in the day he was lined up for identification hy 
the girl, among a crowd of other men. 

The girl looked down the line, and we watched her 
curiously — a slim creature with dark hair neatly coiled. 

She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger. 

*' Le voild! . . . cest Vhomme." 

There was no mistake about it, and the man looked 
sheepishly at her, not denying. He was sent off under 
escort to the military prison in St.-Omer for court- 
martial. 

"What's the punishment — if guilty.?" I asked. 

"Death," said the colonel, resuming his egg. 

He was a fine-looking fellow, the prisoner. He had 
answered the call for king and country without delay. 
In the estaminety after coming down from the salient for 
a machine-gun course, he had drunk more beer than was 
good for him, and the face of a pretty girl had bewitched 
him, stirring up desire. He wanted to kiss her lips. . . . 
There were no women in the Ypres salient. Nothing 
pretty or soft. It was hell up there, and this girl was a 
pretty witch, bringing back thoughts of the other side 
— for life, womanhood, love, caresses which were good for 
the souls and bodies of men. It was a starved life up 
there in the salient. . . . Why shouldn't she give him her 
lips.f* Wasn't he fighting for France .f* Wasn't he a tall 
and proper lad.? Curse the girl for being so sulky to an 
English soldier! . . . And now, if those other women, those 
old hags, were to swear against him things he had never 
said, things he had never done, unless drink had made 
him forget — by God! supposing drink had made him for- 
get? — he would be shot against a white wall. Shot — 
dead — disgracefully, shamefully, by his own comrades! 
O Christ! and the little mother in a Sussex cottage! . . . 



XII 

Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion 
headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was 



36 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

attending a court martial. Presently he came into the 
wooden hut, with a flushed face. 

" Sorry I had to keep you," he said. "To-morrow there 
will be one swine less in the world/' 

"A death sentence?" 

He noddedo 

"A damned coward. Said he didn't mind rifle-fire, but 
couldn't stand shells. Admitted he left his post. He 
doesn't mind rifle-fire! . . . Well, to-morrow morning—" 

The ofiicer laughed grimly, and then hstened for a 
second. 

There were some heavy crumps falHng over Kemmel 
Hill, rather close, it seemed, to our wooden hut. 

"Damn those German gunners!" said the officer. 
"Why can't they give us a little peace?" 

He turned to his papers, but several times while I talked 
with him he jerked his head up and listened to a heavy 
crash. 

On the way back I saw a man on foot, walking in front 
of a mounted man, past the old hill of the Scherpenberg, 
toward the village of Locre. There was something in 
the way he walked, in his attitude— the head hunched 
forward a little, and his arms behind his back — which 
made me turn to look at him. He was manacled, and 
tied by a rope to the mounted man. I caught one glimpse 
of his face, and then turned away, cold and sick. There 
was doom written on his face, and in his eyes a captured 
look. He was walking to his wall. 

XIII 

There were other men who could not stand shell-fire. 
It filled them with an animal terror and took all will-power 
out of them. One young officer was hke that man who 
"did not mind rifle-fire." He, by some strange freak of 
psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had 
done several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful 
in the trenches until the enemy barraged them with high 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 37 

explosive. Then he was seen wandering back to the sup- 
port trenches in a dazed way. It happened three times, 
and he was sentenced to death. Before going out at 
dawn to face the firing-squad he was calm. There was a 
lighted candle on the table, and he sorted out his personal 
belongings and made small packages of them as keepsakes 
for his family and friends. His hand did not tremble. 
When his time came he put out the candle, between thumb 
and finger, raised his hand, and said, "Right O!" 

Another man, shot for cowardice in face of the enemy, 
was sullen and silent to one who hoped to comfort him in 
the last hour. The chaplain asked him whether he had 
any message for his relatives. He said, "I have no 
relatives." He was asked whether he would like to say 
any prayers, and he said, "I don't believe in them." The 
chaplain talked to him, but could get no answer — and 
time was creeping on. There were two guards in the 
room, sitting motionless, with loaded rifles between their 
knees. Outside it was silent in the courtyard, except for 
little noises of the night and the wind. The chaplain 
suffered, and was torn with pity for that sullen man 
whose life was almost at an end. He took out his hymn- 
book and said: "I will sing to you. It will pass the time." 
He sang a hymn, and once or twice his voice broke a little, 
but he steadied it. Then the man said, "I will sing with 
you." He knew all the hymns, words and music. It 
was an unusual, astonishing knowledge, and he went on 
singing, hymn after hymn, with the chaplain by his side. 
It was the chaplain who tired first. His voice cracked 
and his throat became parched. Sweat broke out on his 
forehead, because of the nervous strain. But the man 
who was going to die sang on in a clear, hard voice. A 
faint glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage win- 
dow. There were not many minutes more. The two 
guards shifted their feet. "Now," said the man, "we'll 
sing 'God Save the King.'" The two guards rose and 
stood at attention, and the chaplain sang the national 



38 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

anthem with the man who was to be shot for cowardice. 
Then the tramp of the firing-party came across the cobble- 
stones in the courtyard. It was dawn. 

XIV 

Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were 
generals who said: "There is no such thing as shell-shock. 
It is cowardice. I would court-martial in every case.'* 
Doctors said: "It is difficult to draw the line between 
shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as 
mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues 
by concussion, or actual physical damage to the brain; 
sometimes it is a shock of horror unbalancing the mind, 
but that is more rare. It is not generally the slight, ner- 
vous men who suffer worst from shell-shock. It is often 
the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being 
utterly without nerves, who goes down badly. Something 
snaps in him. He has no resilience in his nervous system. 
He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so 
stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cock- 
ney, for example, is always training himself in the control 
of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the 
traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one 
situations which demand self-control in a 'nervy' man. 
That helps him in war; whereas the yokel, or the sergeant- 
major type, is splendid until the shock comes. Then he 
may crack. But there is no law. Imagination — appre- 
hension — are the devil, too, and they go with 'nerves.'" 

It was a sergeant-major whom I saw stricken badly 
with shell-shock in Aveluy Wood near Thiepval. He 
was convulsed with a dreadful rigor like a man in epilepsy, 
and clawed at his mouth, moaning horribly, with livid 
terror in his eyes. He had to be strapped to a stretcher 
before he could be carried away. He had been a tall and 
splendid man, this poor, terror-stricken lunatic. 
, J Nearer to Thiepval, during the fighting there, other 
men were brought down with shell-shock. I remember 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 39 

one of them now, though I saw many others. He was 
a Wiltshire lad, very young, with an apple-cheeked face 
and blue-gray eyes. He stood outside a dugout, shaking 
in every limb, in a palsied way. His steel hat was at the 
back of his head and his mouth slobbered, and two com- 
rades could not hold him still. 

These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths 
ceaselessly. It was a common, dreadful action. Others 
sat in the field hospitals in a state of coma, dazed, as 
though deaf, and actually dumb. I hated to see them, 
turned my eyes away from them, and yet wished that they 
might be seen by bloody-minded men and women who, 
far behind the lines, still spoke of war lightly, as a kind of 
sport, or heroic game, which brave boys liked or ought to 
like, and said, "We'll fight on to the last man rather than 
accept anything less than absolute victory," and when 
victory came said: "We stopped too soon. We ought to 
have gone on for another three months." It was for 
fighting-men to say those things, because they knew the 
things they suffered and risked. That word "we" was 
not to be used by gentlemen in government offices scared 
of air raids, nor by women dancing in scanty frocks at 
war-bazaars for the "poor dear wounded," nor even by 
generals at G. H. Q., enjoying the thrill of war without 
its dirt and danger. 

Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, dur- 
ing years of fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people 
who had not seen, and were callous of this misery; the 
laughing girls in the Strand greeting the boys on seven 
days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers 
whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops 
and clergy who praised God as the Commander-in-Chief 
of the AUied armies, and had never said a word before the 
war to make it less inevitable; the schoolmasters who 
gloried in the lengthening "Roll of Honor" and said, 
"We're doing very well," when more boys died; the 
pretty woman-faces ogling in the picture-papers, as "well- 
known war-workers"; the munition-workers who were 



40 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

getting good wages out of the war; the working-women 
who were buying gramophones and furs while their men 
were in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheer- 
ful spirit of England at war. 

Often I was unfair, bitter, unbalanced, wrong. The 
spirit of England, taking it broad and large — with dread- 
ful exceptions — was wonderful in its courage and patience, 
and ached with sympathy for its fighting sons, and was 
stricken with the tragedy of all this slaughter. There 
were many tears in English homes; many sad and lonely 
women. But, as an onlooker, I could not be just or fair, 
and hated the non-combatants who did not reveal its 
wound in their souls, but were placid in their belief that 
we should win, and pleased with themselves because of 
their easy optimism. So easy for those who did not see! 

XV 

As war correspondents we were supposed to have 
honorary rank as captains, by custom and tradition — but 
it amounted to nothing, here or there. We were civilians 
in khaki, with green bands round our right arms, and 
uncertain status. It was better so, because we were in 
the peculiar and privileged position of being able to speak 
to Tommies and sergeants as human beings, to be on 
terms of comradeship with junior subalterns and battalion 
commanders, and to sit at the right hand of generals with- 
out embarrassment to them or to ourselves. 

Physically, many of our generals were curiously alike. 
They were men turned fifty, with square jaws, tanned, 
ruddy faces, searching and rather stern gray eyes, closely 
cropped hair growing white, with a little white mustache, 
neatly trimmed, on the upper lip. 

Mentally they had similar qualities. They had un- 
failing physical courage — though courage is not put to 
the test much in modern generalship, which, above the 
rank of brigadier, works far from the actual line of battle, 
unless it "slips" in the wrong direction. They were stern 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 41 

disciplinarians, and tested the quality of troops by their 
smartness in saluting and on parade, which did not account 
for the fighting merit of the Australians. Most of them 
were conservative by political tradition and hereditary 
instinct, and conservative also in military ideas and 
methods. They distrusted the "brilliant" fellow, and 
were inclined to think him unsafe; and they were not 
quick to allow young men to gain high command at the 
expense of their gray hair and experience. They were 
industrious, able, conscientious men, never sparing them- 
selves long hours of work for a life of ease, and because 
they were willing to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, 
for their country's sake, they demanded equal willingness 
of sacrifice from every officer and man under their au- 
thority, having no mercy whatever for the slacker or the 
weakling. 

Among them there was not one whose personality had 
that mysterious but essential quality of great generalship 
— inspiring large bodies of men with exalted enthusiasm, 
devotion, and faith. It did not matter to the men 
whether an army commander, a corps commander, or a 
divisional commander stood in the roadside to watch 
them march past on their way to battle or on their way 
back. They saw one of these sturdy men in his brass 
hat, with his ruddy face and white mustache, but no 
thrill passed down their ranks, no hoarse cheers broke 
from them because he was there, as when Wellington sat 
on his white horse in the Peninsular War, or as when 
Napoleon saluted his Old Guard, or even as when Lord 
Roberts, "Our Bob," came perched like a little old falcon 
on his big charger. 

Nine men out of ten in the ranks did not even know 
the name of their army general or of the corps commander. 
It meant nothing to them. They did not face death with 
more passionate courage to win the approval of a military 
idol. That was due partly to the conditions of modern 
warfare, which make it difficult for generals of high rank 
to get into direct personal touch with their troops, and to 



42 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the masses of men engaged. But those difficulties could 
have been overcome by a general of impressive personality, 
able to stir the imaginations of men by words of fire 
spoken at the right time, by deep, human sympathy, and 
by the luck of victory seized by daring adventure against 
great odds. 

No such man appeared on the western front until Foch 
obtained the supreme command. On the British front 
there was no general with the gift of speech — a gift too 
much despised by our British men of action — or with a 
character and prestige which could raise him to the 
highest rank in popular imagination. During the retreat 
from Mona, Sir John French had a touch of that personal 
power — his presence meant something to the men because 
of his reputation in South Africa; but afterward, when 
trench warfare began, and the daily routine of slaughter 
under German gun-fire, when our artillery was weak, and 
w^hen our infantry was ordered to attack fixed positions 
of terrible strength without adequate support, and not 
a dog's chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of 
the Commander-in-Chief faded from men's minds and he 
lost place in their admiration. It was washed out in 
blood and mud. 

Sir Douglas Haig, who followed Sir John French, in- 
herited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that 
war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with 
enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond 
a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general 
headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, 
near the coast, had the affection and loyalty of the stafF- 
officers. A man of remarkably good looks, with fine, 
delicate features, strengthened by the firm fine of his jaw, 
and of singular sweetness, courtesy, and simplicity in his 
manner toward all who approached him, he had qualities 
which might have raised him to the supreme height of 
personal influence among his armies but for lack of the 
magic touch and the tragic condition of his command. 

He was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from pub- 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 43 

licity and holding himself aloof from the human side of 
war. He was constitutionally unable to make a dramatic 
gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring things 
to officers and men whom he reviewed. His shyness and 
reserve prevented him also from knowing as much as he 
ought to have known about the opinions of officers and 
men, and getting direct information from them. He held 
the supreme command of the British armies on the west- 
ern front when, in the battlefields of the Somme and 
Flanders, of Picardy and Artois, there was not much 
chance for daring strategy, but only for hammer-strokes 
by the flesh and blood of men against fortress positions — ■ 
the German trench systems, twenty-five miles deep in 
tunneled earthworks and machine-gun dugouts — ^when the 
immensity of casualties among British troops was out of 
all proportion to their gains of ground, so that our men's 
spirits revolted against these massacres of their youth 
and they were embittered against the generalship and 
stafF-work which directed these sacrificial actions. 

This sense of bitterness became intense, to the point of 
fury, so that a young stafF-officer, in his red tabs, with a 
jaunty manner, was like a red rag to a bull among bat- 
talion officers and men, and they desired his death ex- 
ceedingly, exalting his little personality, dressed in a well- 
cut tunic and fawn-colored riding-breeches and highly 
polished top-boots, into the supreme folly of "the Staff" 
which made men attack impossible positions, send down 
conflicting orders, issued a litter of documents — called by 
an ugly name — containing impracticable instructions, to 
the torment of the adjutants and to the scorn of the 
troops. This hatred of the Staff" was stoked high by the 
fires of passion and despair. Some of it was unjust, and 
even the jaunty young stafF-officer — a G. S. O. 3, with 
red tabs and polished boots — was often not quite such a 
fool as he looked, but a fellow who had proved his pluck 
in the early days of the war and was now doing his duty 
— about equal to the work of a boy clerk — ^with real in- 
dustry and an exaggerated sense of its importance. 



44 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Personally I can pay high tribute to some of our stafF- 
officers at divisional, corps, and army headquarters, be- 
cause of their industry, efficiency, and devotion to duty. 
And during the progress of battle I have seen them, hun- 
dreds of times, working desperately for long hours with- 
out much rest or sleep, so that the fighting-men should get 
their food and munitions, so that the artillery should 
support their actions, and the troops in reserve move up 
to their relief at the proper time and place. 

Owing largely to new army brains the administrative 
side of our war became efficient in its method and organi- 
zation, and the armies were worked like clockwork ma- 
chines. The transport was good beyond all words of 
praise, and there was one thing which seldom failed to 
reach poor old Tommy Atkins, unless he was cut off by 
shell-fire, and that was his food. The motor-supply 
columns and ammunition-dumps were organized to the 
last item. Our map department was magnificent, and 
the admiration of the French. Our Intelligence branch 
became valuable (apart from a frequent insanity of 
optimism) and was sometim.es uncanny in the accuracy 
of its information about the enemy's disposition and 
plans. So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in 
its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp 
tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts, made out, 
with pardonable blasphemy, in their dugouts. 

Nevertheless the system was bad and British general- 
ship made many mistakes, some of them, no doubt, un- 
avoidable, because it is human to err, and some of them 
due to sheer, simple, impregnable stupidity. 

In the early days the outstanding fault of our generals 
was their desire to gain ground which was utterly worth- 
less when gained. They organized small attacks against 
strong positions, dreadfully costly to take, and after the 
desperate valor of men had seized a few yards of mangled 
earth, found that they had made another small salient, 
jutting out from their front in a V-shaped wedge, so that 
it was a death-trap for the men who had to hold it. This 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 45 

was done again and again, and I remember one distin- 
guished officer saying, with bitter irony, remembering 
how many of his men had died, "Our generals must have 
their Kttle V's at any price, to justify themselves at 
G. H. Q." 

In the battles of the Somme they attacked isolated 
objectives on narrow fronts, so that the enemy swept our 
men with fire by artillery concentrated from all points, 
instead of having to disperse his fire during a general 
attack on a wide front. In the days of trench warfare, 
when the enemy artillery was much stronger than ours, 
and when his infantry strength was enormously greater, 
our generals insisted upon the British troops maintaining 
an "aggressive" attitude, with the result that they were 
shot to pieces, instead of adopting, like the French, a 
quiet and waiting attitude until the time came for a sharp 
and terrible blow. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertu- 
bert, and Loos, in 191 5, cost us thousands of dead and 
gave us no gain of any account; and both generalship 
and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who 
know anything of those battles, ghastly. 

After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the 
private soldier, and the young battalion officer, in con- 
ditions of warfare which had never been seen before — 
and it was bad for the private soldier and the young bat- 
talion officer, who died so they might learn. As time 
went on stafF-work improved, and British generalship was 
less rash in optimism and less rigid in ideas. 

XVI 

General Haldane was friendly to the war correspond- 
ents — he had been something of the kind himself in 
earlier days — and we were welcomed at his headquarters, 
both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward 
when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought 
during the war, and I think now, that he had more intel- 
lect and "quality" than many of our other generals.. A 



46 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of movement 
and gesture, not "stocky" or rigid, but nervous and 
restless, he gave one a sense of power and intensity of 
purpose. There was a kind of slow-burning fire in him — 
a hatred of the enemy which was not weakened in him by 
any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to me, 
against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he 
may have felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions 
upon his liberty of command. A bitter irony was often 
in his laughter when discussing politicians at home, and 
the wider strategy of war apart from that on his own 
front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found 
widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in 
his attitude toward life. The officers and men under his 
command accused him of ruthlessness. But they ad- 
mitted that he took more personal risk than he need have 
done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the 
trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged 
that he was generous in his praise of their good service, 
though merciless if he found fault with them. He held 
himself aloof — too much, I am sure — from his battalion 
officers, and had an extreme haughtiness of bearing which 
was partly due to reserve and that shyness which is in 
many Englishmen and a few Scots. 

In the old salient warfare he often demanded service 
in the way of raids and the holding of death-traps, and the 
execution of minor attacks which caused many casual- 
ties, and filled men with rage and horror at what they 
believed to be unnecessary waste of life — their life, and 
their comrades' — that did not make for popularity in the 
ranks of the battalion messes. Privately, in his own 
mess, he was gracious to visitors, and revealed not only 
a wide range of knowledge outside as well as inside his 
profession, but a curious, unexpected sympathy for ideas, 
not belonging as a rule to generals of the old caste. I 
liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame 
and steel in his nature which made his psychology a 
world away from mine. He was hit hard — in what I 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 47 

think was the softest spot in his heart — by the death of 
one of his A. D. C.'s — young Congreve, who was the heau 
ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even 
when covered from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him 
one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger, to the 
verge of recklessness. General Haldane had marked him 
out as the most promising young soldier in the whole 
army. A bit of shell, a senseless bit of steel, spoiled that 
promise — as it spoiled the promise of a million boys — ■ 
and the general was saddened more than by the death of 
other gallant officers. 

I have one memory of General Haldane which shows 
him in a different light. It was during the great German 
offensive in the north, when Arras was hard beset and 
the enemy had come back over Monchy Hill and was 
shelling villages on the western side of Arras, which until 
then had been undamaged. It was in one of these villages 
— near Avesnes-le-Compte — ^to which the general had 
come back with his corps headquarters, established there 
for many months in earlier days, so that the peasants and 
their children knew him well by sight and had talked with 
him, because he liked to speak French with them. When 
I went to see him one day during that bad time in April 
of '18, he was surrounded by a group of children who were 
asking anxiously whether Arras would be taken. He 
drew a map for them in the dust of the roadway, and 
showed them where the enemy was attacking and the 
general strategy. He spoke simply and gravely, as though 
to a group of staff-officers, and the children followed his 
diagram in the dust and understood him perfectly. 

"They will not take Arras if I can help it,'* he said. 
"You will be all right here." 



XVII 

Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general 
in the days of Sir John French, and I dined at his mess 
once or twice, and he came to ours on return visits. The 



48 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

son of Macready, the actor, ne had a subtlety of mind 
not common among British generals, to whom "subtlety" 
in any form is repulsive. His sense of humor was devel- 
oped upon lines of irony and he had a sly twinkle in his 
eyes before telling one of his innumerable anecdotes. 
They were good stories, and I remember one of them, 
which had to do w^ith the retreat from Mons. It was not, 
to tell the truth, that "orderly" retreat which is described 
in second-hand accounts. There were times when it was 
a wild stampede from the tightening loop of a German 
advance, with lorries and motor-cycles and transport 
wagons going helter-skelter among civilian refugees and 
mixed battalions and stragglers from every unit walking, 
footsore, in small groups. Even General Headquarters 
was flurried at times, far in advance of this procession 
backward. One night Sir Neville Macready, with the 
judge advocate and an officer named Colonel Childs (a 
hot-headed fellow!), took up their quarters in a French 
chateau somewhere, I think, in the neighborhood of Creil. 
The Commander-in-Chief was in another chateau some dis- 
tance away. Other branches of G. H. Q. were billeted in 
private houses, widely scattered about a straggling village. 

Colonel Childs was writing opposite the adjutant-gen- 
eral, who was working silently. Presently Childs looked 
up, listened, and said: 

"It's rather quiet, sir, outside." 

"So much the better," growled General Macready. 
"Get on with your job." 

A quarter of an hour passed. No rumble of traffic 
passed by the windows. No gun-wagons were jolting over 
French pave. 

Colonel Childs looked up again and listened. 

"It's damned quiet outside, sir." 

"Well, don't go making a noise," said the general. 
"Can't you see I'm busy?" 

"I think I'll just take a turn round," said Colonel Childs. 

He felt uneasy. Something in the silence of the village 
scared him. He went out into the roadway and walked 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 49 

toward Sir John French's quarters. There was no chal- 
lenge from a sentry. The British Expeditionary Force 
seemed to be sleeping. They needed sleep — poor beg- 
gars ! — but the Germans did not let them take much. 

Colonel Childs went into the Commander-in-Chiefs 
chateau and found a soldier in the front hall, hcking out 
a jam-pot. 

"Where's the Commander-in-Chief.?" asked the officer. 

"Gone hours ago, sir," said the soldier. "I was left 
behind for lack of transport. From what I hear the Ger- 
mans ought to be here by now. I rather fancy I heard 
some shots pretty close awhile ago." 

Colonel Childs walked back to his own quarters quickly. 
He made no apology for interrupting the work of the 
adjutant-general. 

"General, the whole box of tricks has gone. We've 
been left behind. Forgotten!" 

"The dirty dogs!" said General Macready. 

There was not much time for packing up, and only one 
motor-car, and only one rifle. The general said he would 
look after the rifle, but Colonel Childs said if that were 
so he would rather stay behind and take his chance of 
being captured. It would be safer for him. So the 
adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assist- 
ant judge advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or 
two packed into the car and set out to find G. H. Q. 
Before they found it they had to run the gantlet of Ger- 
mans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and 
took flying shots at moving figures. Then, miJ.es away, 
they found G. H. Q. 

"And weren't they sorry to see me again!" said General 
Macready, who told me the tale. "They thought they 
had lost me forever." 

The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant- 
general one evening when I was dining in his mess. The 
orderly put it down by the side of his plate, and he inter- 
rupted a funny story to glance down the columns of names. 

"Du Maurier has been killed. . . . I'm sorry." 



50 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

He put down the paper beside his plate again and con- 
tinued his story, and we all laughed heartily at the end 
of the anecdote. It was the only way, and the soldier's 
way. There was no hugging of grief when our best friend 
fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's hfe, and then, "Carry 
on!" 

XVIII 

Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles 
of the Somme, I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir 
Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and 
several times I met the army commander there and else- 
where. One of my first meetings with him was extraor- 
dinarily embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While 
he was organizing his army, which was to be called, with 
unconscious irony, "The Army of Pursuit" — the battles 
of the Somme were a siege rather than a pursuit — he de- 
sired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the 
war correspondents were then quartered. As we were 
paying for it and liked it, we put up an opposition which 
was most annoying to his A. D. C.'s, especially to one 
young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty manners, 
and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who 
had looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at 
the doors, and then said, "This will suit us down to the 
ground." On my way back from the salient one evening 
I walked up the drive in the flickering light of summer 
eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of 
whom I thought I recognized as an old friend. 

"Hullo!" I said, cheerily. "You here again?" 

Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry 
Rawlinson. He must have been surprised, but dug me in 
the ribs in a genial way, and said, "Hullo, young feller!" 

He made no further attempt to "pinch" our quarters, 
but my famihar method of address could not have pro- 
duced that result. 

His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old 
chateau on the Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleas- 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 51 

ant fields through which a stream wound its way. Every- 
where the sign-boards were red, and a mihtary poHceman, 
authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, 
slowed down every motor-car on its way through the 
village, as though Sir Henry Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, 
so anxious were his gestures and his expression of "Hush! 
do be careful!" 

The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish 
eye. He seemed to be thinking to himself, "This war 
is a rare old joke!" He spoke habitually of the enemy as 
"the old Hun" or "old Fritz," in an affectionate, con- 
temptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but 
getting the worst of it every time. Before the battles 
of the Somme I had a talk with him among his maps, and 
found that I had been to many places in his line which 
he did not seem to know. He could not find them very 
quickly on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, 
though I concluded that this was "camouflage," in case 
I might tell "old Fritz" that such places existed. Like 
most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening op- 
timism. He had always got the enemy "nearly beat," 
and he arranged attacks during the Somme fighting with 
the jovial sense of striking another blow which would 
lead this time to stupendous results. In the early days, 
in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and 
he was a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of 
decision and a quick intelligence in open warfare. His 
trouble on the Somme was that the enemy did not permit 
open warfare, but made a siege of it, with defensive lines 
all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a 
machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We 
were alv/ays preparing for a "break-through" for cavalry 
pursuit, and the cavalry were always being massed behind 
the lines and then turned back again, after futile waiting, 
encumbering the roads. "The blood bath of the Somme," 
as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and 
scores of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men 
lying strewn over those dreadful fields, after desperate 



52 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

and, in the end, successful attacks through the woods of 
death — Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, 
Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge 
to Courcellette and Martinpuich — I thought of Rawhn- 
son in his chateau in Querrieux, scheming out the battles 
and ordering up new masses of troops to the great assault 
over the bodies of their dead. . . . Well, it is not for gen- 
erals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoan- 
ing slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when 
directing battle. It is their job to be cheerful, to harden 
their hearts against the casualty lists, to keep out of the 
danger-zone unless their presence is strictly necessary. 
But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the 
fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Com- 
mand and see no sense in them, should be savage in their 
irony when they pass a peaceful house where their doom 
is being planned, and green-eyed when they see an army 
general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, v/ith a jaunty 
young A. D. C. slashing the flowers with his cane and 
telling the latest joke from London to his laughing chief. 
As onlookers of sacrifice some of us — ^I, for one — ^adopted 
the point of view of the men who were to die, finding some 
reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were 
doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much 
intelligence as God had given them. Gen. Sir Llenry 
Rawlinson was one of our best generals, as may be seen 
by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last phase com- 
manded a real "Army of Pursuit," which had the enemy 
on the run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that 
last phase of open warfare that Rawlinson showed his 
qualities of generalship and once again that driving pur- 
pose which was his in the Somme battles, but achieved 
only by prodigious cost of life. 

XIX 

Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army be- 
fore he was succeeded by Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 53 

to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very little except by 
hearsay. He went by the name of "The Bull," because 
of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that 
followed the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis 
of the Scarpe did not reveal high generalship. There 
were many young ojfi&cers — and some divisional generals 
— ^who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without 
sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which 
poured back, day by day, with tales of tragic happenings 
did not inspire one with a sense of some high purpose 
behind it all, or some presiding genius. 

General Byng, "Bungo Byng," as he was called by his 
troops, won the admiration of the Canadian Corps which 
he commanded, and afterward, in the Cambrai advance 
of November, '17, he showed daring of conception and 
gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel 
methods of attack — spoiled by the quick come-back of 
the enemy under Von Marwitz and our withdrawal from 
Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other 
places, after desperate fighting. 

His chief of staff. Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, 
gentle-mannered man, with a scientific outlook on the 
problems of war, and so kind in his expression and char- 
acter that it seemed impossible that he could devise 
methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was 
like an Oxford professor of history discoursing on the 
Marlborough wars, though when I saw him many times 
outside the Third Army headquarters, in a railway car- 
riage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme 
battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strat- 
egy for actions to be fought next day which would be of 
bloody consequence to our men and the enemy. 

General Birdwood, commanding the AustraHan Corps, 
and afterward the Fifth Army in succession to General 
Gough, was always known as "Birdie" by high and low, 
and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had a 
human touch with him which won him the affection of 
all his troops. 

5 



54 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another 
man of character in high command. He spoke of himself 
in the House of Commons one day as "a plain, blunt 
soldier," and the army roared with laughter from end to 
end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He 
was a man of airy imagination and a wide range of knowl- 
edge, and theories on life and war which he put forward 
with dramatic eloquence. 

It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told 
about the drunken soldier put onto a stretcher and cov- 
ered with a blanket, to get him out of the way when the 
army commander made a visit to the lines. 

*' What's this?" said the general. 

** Casualty, sir," said the quaking platoon commander. 

"Not bad, I hope?" 

**Dead, sir," said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk. 

The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic 
way, "The army commander salutes the honored dead!" 

And the drunken private put his head from under the 
blanket and asked, "What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?" 

That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, 
but it went through the army affixed to the name of 
Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit him. 

The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the 
Somme, when many of our divisions were cut to pieces in 
the attempt to break the German line at Gommecourt. 
It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the success on 
the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter 
Weston was not degomme^ as the French would say, and 
continued to air his theories on life and warfare until the 
day of Victory, when once again we had "muddled 
through," not by great generalship, but by the courage 
of common men. 

Among the divisional generals with whom I came in 
contact — I met most of them at one time or another — 
were General Hull of the 56th (London) Division, General 
Hickey of the i6th (Irish) Division, General Harper of 
the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 55 

(Ulster) Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Ban- 
tams) Division, afterward of the 33d. 

General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, 
straight-thinking man, and I should say an able general. 
** Ruthless," his men said, but this was a war of ruthless- 
ness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times, 
because he had to order his men to do things which he 
knew were folly. I remember sitting on the window-sill 
of his bedroom, in an old house of Arras, while he gave me 
an account of "the battle in the dark," in which the 
Londoners and other English troops lost their direction 
and found themselves at dawn with the enemy behind 
them. General Hull made no secret of the tragedy or 
the stupidity. . . . On another day I met him somewhere 
on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he 
was commanding the i6th (Irish) Division in the absence 
of General Hickey, who was ill. He talked a good deal 
about the belief in a great German offensive, and gave 
many reasons for thinking it was all "blulF." A few days 
later the enemy had rolled over his lines. . . . Out of thir- 
teen generals I met at that time, there were only three 
who believed that the enemy would make his great assault 
in a final effort to gain decisive victory, though our Intel- 
ligence had amassed innumerable proofs and were utterly 
convinced of the approaching menace. 

*'They will never risk it!" said General Gorringe of 
the 47th (London) Division. *'Our lines are too strong. 
We should mow them down." 

I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports 
of the London men. We could see the German lines, 
south of St.-Quentin, very quiet over there, without any 
sign of coming trouble. A few days later the place where 
we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops. 

I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. 
An Irishman himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier 
as drawn by Charles Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his 
boys, he was always pleased to see me because he knew 
I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He 



56 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

had a good story to tell every time, and passed me on to 
"the boys" to get at the heart of them. It was long 
before he lost hope of keeping the division together, 
though it was hard to get recruits and losses were high 
at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost 
heart and was very sad when the division was cut to 
pieces in a Flanders battle. It lost 2,000 men and 162 
officers before the battle began — they were shelled to 
death in the trenches — and 2,000 men and 170 officers 
more during the progress of the battle. It was mur- 
derous and ghastly. 

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, after- 
ward commanding the 4th Corps, had the respect of his 
troops, though they called him "Uncle" because of his 
shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his 
command, fought many battles and gained great honor, 
even from the enemy, who feared them and called the 
kilted men "the ladies from hell." It was to them the 
Germans sent their message in a small balloon during the 
retreat from the Somme: "Poor old 51st. Still sticking 
it! Cheery-oh!" 

"Uncle" Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and 
was ironical with war correspondents, and censors, and 
the British public, and new theories of training, and many 
things in which he saw no sense. There was a smolder- 
ing passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes. 

He was against bayonet-training, which took the field 
against rifle-fire for a time. 

"No man in this war," he said, with a sweeping asser- 
tion, "has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had 
his hands up first." And, broadly speaking, I think he 
was right, in spite of the Director of Training, who was 
extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority. 

XX 

I met many other generals who were men of ability, 
energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 57 

found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly 
molded to the same type, strangely limited in their range 
of ideas and qualities of character. 

"One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with 
generals," said a friend of mine, after lunching with an 
army commander. 

That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines 
of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, 
their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their 
imagination were restricted to the traditional views of 
EngHsh country gentlemen of the Tory school. Any- 
thing outside that range of thought was to them heresy, 
treason, or wishy-washy sentiment. 

What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the 
system which put the High Command into the hands of 
a group of men belonging to the old school of war, unable, 
by reason of their age and traditions, to get away from 
rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new con- 
ditions. 

Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its 
system of training, if I am justified in forming such an 
opinion from specimens produced by it, who had the 
brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam. There 
was also a close corporation among the officers of the 
Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff 
appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of 
the new armies, whose brain-power, to say the least of it, 
was on a higher level than that of the Sandhurst standard. 
Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier obtained 
a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved 
the value of the business mind applied to war, and this 
was seen very clearly — blindingly — in the able general- 
ship of the Australian Corps, in which most of the com- 
manders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others, were 
men in civil life before the war. The same thing was 
observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps 
commander, having been an estate agent, and many of 
his high officers having had no military training of any 



S8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

scientific importance before they handled their own men 
in France and Flanders. 



XXI 

As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism 
must be modified in favor of the generalship and organi- 
zation of the Second Army — of rare efi&ciency under the 
restrictions and authority of the General Staff. I often 
used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir Herbert 
Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was 
almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with 
his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a 
fierce little white mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and 
a little pot-belly and short legs. He puffed and panted 
when he walked, and after two minutes in his company 
Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The 
staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any 
machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of 
the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, 
as so many others, but prepared with minute attention 
to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general 
scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a 
model in organization and method, and worked in its 
frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death 
machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of 
'17, ghastly as they were in the losses of our men in the 
state of the ground through which they had to fight, and 
in futile results, were well organized by the Second Army 
headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanage- 
ment of other troops, the contrast being visible to every 
battalion officer and even to the private soldier. How 
much share of this was due to Sir Herbert Plumer it is 
impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to give him 
credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in 
the choice of men. 

He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and 
beyond all doubt this general was the organizing brain of 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 59 

the Second Army, though with punctilious chivalry he 
gave, always, the credit of all his work to the army com- 
mander, A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with ex- 
treme simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he 
impressed me as a brain of the highest temper and quality 
in stafF-work. His memory for detail was like a card- 
index system, yet his mind was not clogged with detail, 
but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole 
broad sweep of the problem which confronted him. There 
was something fascinating as well as terrible in his ex- 
position of a battle that he was planning. For the first 
time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after 
all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that 
it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to 
the nth. degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe 
by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here 
at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific busi- 
ness, according to the methods of science — calculating 
the weight and eiFect of gun-fire, the strength of the 
enemy's defenses and man-power, the psychology of 
German generalship and of German units, the pressure 
which could be put on British troops before the breaking- 
point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of 
poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the 
disposition of German guns and the probability of their 
movement in this direction or that, the amount of their 
wastage under our counter-battery work, the advantages 
of attacks in depth — one body of troops "leap-frogging," 
another in an advance to further objectives — ^the time- 
table of transport, the supply of food and water and 
ammunition, the comfort of troops before action, and a 
thousand other factors of success. 

Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and 
on the eve of it. Sir John Harington sent for the war 
correspondents and devoted an hour or more to a detailed 
explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards on 
the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither 
minimizing nor exaggerating the difficulties and dangers 



6o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

of the attack, pointing out the tactical obstacles which 
must be overcome before any chance of success, and ex- 
posing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest 
speech. 

I used to study him at those times, and marveled at 
him. After intense and prolonged work at all this detail 
involving the lives of thousands of men, he was highly 
wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain at full 
tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never 
depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. 
He was a chemist explaining the factors of a great experi- 
ment of which the result was still uncertain. He could 
only hope for certain results after careful analysis and 
synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed 
sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was 
likely to cause them — surprises which would lead to a 
massacre of their men. He warmed to the glory of the 
courage of the troops who were carrying out his plans. 

"It depends on these fellows," he would say. "I am 
setting them a difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope 
and believe, it will be a fine achievement. They have 
been very much tried, poor fellows, but their spirit is still 
high, as I know from their commanding officers." 

One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice 
between the fighting units and the Staff. "We want 
them to know that we are all working together, for the 
same purpose and with the same zeal. They cannot do 
without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want 
them to feel that the work done here is to help them to 
do theirs more easily, with lighter losses, in better physical 
conditions, with organization behind them at every stage." 

Many times the Second Army would not order an 
attack or decide the time of it before consulting the divi- 
sional generals and brigadiers, and obtaining their con- 
sensus of opinion. The officers and men in the Second 
Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the 
staffs-work behind them, and felt a confidence in its de- 
votion to their interests which was rare on the western front. 



OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS 6i 

At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington 
would rise and gather up his maps and papers, and say: 

"Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much 
as I do about the plans for to-morrow's battle. At the 
end of the day you will be able to see the result of all our 
work and tell me things I do not know." 

Those conferences took place in the Second Army head- 
quarters on Cassel Hill, in a big building which was a 
casino before the war, with a far-reaching view across 
Flanders, so that one could see in the distance the whole 
sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country 
below Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Haze- 
brouck in the foreground. Often we assembled in a glass 
house, furnished with trestle tables on which maps were 
spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember 
now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass 
roof, and the clammy touch of fog on the window-panes 
stealing through the cracks and creeping into the room. 
The meteorologist of the Second Army was often a gloomy 
prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained 
on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers 
were waiting in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn! 
. . . We said good night to General Harington, each one 
of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama of 
human life and death which we had heard in advance in 
that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh 
and blood before many hours had passed. A kind of 
sickness took possession of my soul when I stumbled down 
the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness, 
over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to 
break one's neck, with the rain dribbling down one's col- 
lar, and, far away, watery lights in the sky, of gun-flashes 
and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of artillery 
thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting 
early to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. 
There would be more streams of bloody, muddy men, 
more crowds of miserable prisoners, more dead bodies 
lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plung- 



62 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ing into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke 
and mud, more dead horses, disemboweled, and another 
victory at fearful cost, over one of the Flanders ridges. 

Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long 
was this to go on — this massacre of youth, this agony of 
men.? Was there no sanity left in the world that could 
settle the argument by other means than this.? When 
we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another 
to take, and another. And what then? Had we such 
endless reserves of men that we could go on gaining ground 
at such a price? Was it to be extermination on both 
sides? The end of civilization itself ? General Harington 
had said : *'The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty 
of reserves on hand and he is lighting hard. It won't be 
a walk-over to-morrow." 

As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure 
of all this tragic drama. The vastness and the duration 
of its horror appalled me. I went to my billet in an old 
monastery, and sat there in thd\ darkness, my window 
glimmering with the faint glow bf distant shell-flashes, 
and said, "O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may 
help us to the end." Then to bed, without undressing. 
There was an early start before the dawn. Major Lytton 
would be with me. He had a gallant look along the 
duckboards. ... Or Montague — white-haired Montague, 
who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and 
gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I 
had no courage on those early mornings of battle. All 
that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we 
came to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and 
passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and 
heard the scream of shells. I hated it all with a cold 
hatred; and I went on hating it for years that seem a 
lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men 
had greater cause, though it was for their sake that I 
suffered most, as an observer of their drama of death. 
... As observers we saw most of the grisly game. 



Part Two 

THE SCHOOL 
OF COURAGE 



EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY 



BY the time stationary warfare had been established 
on the western front in trench Hnes from the sea to 
Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered 
away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the vic- 
tory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the 
slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The "Old Contemptibles" 
were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth 
in many fields of France, but whose spirit still "carried 
on" as an heroic tradition to those who came after them 
into those same fields, to the same fate. The only sur- 
vivors were Regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines 
to form the staff's of new divisions and to train the army 
of volunteers now being raised at home, and men who 
were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines: 
those, and non-commissioned officers who were the best 
schoolmasters of the new boys, the best friends and guides 
of the new officers, stubborn in their courage, hard and 
ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed according to 
their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the shambles. 
It was in March of 191 5 that a lieutenant-colonel in the 
trenches said to me: "I am one out of 150 Regular officers 
still serving with their battalions. That is to say, there 
are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of 1,500." 

That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride 
in a long history of fighting courage. It had helped to 
save England and France by its own death. Those boys 
of ours whom I had seen in the first August of the war, 
landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a festi- 
val, toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them 



6G NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

and loading them with fruit and flowers, had proved the 
quaUty of their spirit and training. As riflemen they had 
stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden check by iForces 
they had despised. They held their fire until the German 
ranks were within eight hundred yards of them, and then 
mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire — before 
we had machine-guns, except as rare specimens, here and 
there. Our horse artillery was beyond any doubt the 
best in the world at that time. Even before peace came 
German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efl&ciency 
of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of 
war that this was the model of all armies, the most per- 
fectly trained. ... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its 
memory remains as the last epic of those professional 
soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took 
"the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to 
fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and 
in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier 
universal fame as a terrible warrior. There will never be 
a Regular Army like that. Modern warfare has opened 
the arena to the multitude. They may no longer sit in 
the Coliseum watching the paid gladiators. If there be 
war they must take their share of its sacrifice. They must 
be victims as well as victors. They must pay for the 
luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by their own 
bodies, and for their safety against aggression by national 
service. 

After the first quick phases of the war this need of 
national soldiers to replace the professional forces became 
clear to the military leaders. The Territorials who had 
been raised for home defense were sent out to fill up the 
gaps, and their elementary training was shown to be good 
enough, as a beginning, in the fighting-lines. The courage 
of those Territorial divisions who came out first to France 
was quickly proved, and soon put to the supreme test, in 
which they did not fail. From the beginning to the end 
these men, who had made a game of soldiering in days of 
peace, yet a serious game to which they had devoted much 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE (>^ 

of their spare time after working-hours, were splendid 
beyond all words of praise, and from the beginning to the 
end the Territorial officers — men of good standing in their 
counties, men of brain and business training — ^were handi- 
capped by lack of promotion and treated with contempt 
by the High Command, who gave preference always to 
the Regular officers in every staff appointment. 

This was natural and inevitable in armies controlled 
by the old Regular school of service and tradition. As a 
close corporation in command of the machine, it was not 
within their nature or philosophy to make way for the 
new type. The Staff College was jealous of its own. 
Sandhurst and Woolwich were still the only schools ot 
soldiering recognized as giving the right "tone" to officers 
and gentlemen fit for high appointment. The cavalry, 
above all, held the power of supreme command in a war 
of machines and chemistry and national psychology. . . . 

I should hate to attack the Regular officer. His caste 
belonged to the best of our blood. He was the heir to 
fine old traditions of courage and leadership in battle. 
He was a gentleman whose touch of arrogance was sub- 
ject to a rigid code of honor which made him look to the 
comfort of his men first, to the health of his horse second, 
to his own physical needs last. He had the stern sense 
of justice of a Roman Centurian, and his men knew that 
though he would not spare them punishment if guilty, he 
would give them always a fair hearing, Vv^ith a point in 
their favor, if possible. It was in their code to take the 
greatest risk in time of danger, to be scornful of death in 
the face of their men whatever secret fear they had, and 
to be proud and jealous of the honor of the regiment. In 
action men found them good to follow — better than some 
of the young officers of the New Army, who had not the 
same traditional pride nor the same instinct for command 
nor the same consideration for their men, though more 
easy-going and human in sympathy. 

So I salute in spirit those battahon officers of the Old 
Army who fulfilled their heritage until it was overwhelmed 



68 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

by new forces, and I find extenuating circumstances even 
in remembrance of the high stupidities, the narrow imag- 
ination, the deep, impregnable, intolerant ignorance of 
Staff College men who with their red tape and their 
general orders were the inquisitors and torturers of the 
new armies. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. They 
were molded in an old system, and could not change their 
cliche. 

II 

The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener 
and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising 
methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, 
so that every wall in London and great cities, every fence 
in rural places, was placarded with picture-posters. 

. . . "What did you do in the Great War, Daddy.?" . . . 
"What will your best girl say if you're not in khaki.?" 

Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred 
many simple souls, and so were good enough. It would 
have been better to let the people know more of the truth 
of what was happening in France and Flanders — the truth 
of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiques, 
hiding the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, 
veiling all the drama of that early fighting by a deliberate 
screen of mystery, though all was known to the enemy. 
It was fear of their own people, not of the enemy, which 
guided the rules of censorship then and later. 

For some little time the British people did not under- 
stand what was happening. How could they know.? It 
appeared that all was going well. Then why worry? 
Soon there would be the joy-bells of peace, and the boys 
would come marching home again, as in earlier wars. It 
was only very slowly — because of the conspiracy of silence 
— ^that there crept into the consciousness of our people the 
dim realization of a desperate struggle ahead, in which 
all their young manhood would be needed to save France 
and Belgium, and — dear God! — England herself. It was 
as that thought touched one mind and another that the 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 69 

recruiting offices were crowded with young men. Some of 
them offered their bodies because of the promise of a great 
adventure — ^and Kfe had been rather dull in office and fac- 
tory and on the farm. Something stirred in their blood 
— an old call to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, sav- 
age kind, for open-air life, fighting, killing, the comrade- 
ship of hunters, violent emotions, the chance of death, 
surged up into the brains of quiet boys, clerks, mechanics, 
miners, factory hands. It was the call of the wild — the 
hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities of the world's 
dawn, which is in the embryo of modern man. The 
shock of anger at frightful tales from Belgium — little 
children with their hands cut off (no evidence for that 
one); women foully outraged; civilians shot in cold blood 
— sent many men at a quick pace to the recruiting agents. 
Others were sent there by the taunt of a girl, or the sneer 
of a comrade in khaki, or the straight, steady look in the 
eyes of a father who said, "What about it, Dick? . . . The 
old country is up against it." It was that last thought 
which worked in the brain of England's manhood. That 
was his real call, which whispered to men at the plow 
— quiet, ruminating lads, the peasant type, the yeoman — 
and excited undergraduates in their rooms at Oxford and 
Cambridge, and the masters of public schools, and all 
manner of young men, and some, as I know, old in years 
but young in heart. "The old country is in danger!" 
The shadow of a menace was creeping over some little 
patch of England — or of Scotland, 

"I's best be going," said the village boy. 

"*Dulce et decorum est — ■'" said the undergraduate. 

"I hate the idea, but it's got to be done," said the city- 
bred man. 

So they disappeared from their familiar haunts — ^more 
and more of them as the months passed. They were put 
into training-camps, "pigged" it on dirty straw in dirty 
barns, were ill-fed and ill-equipped, and trained by hard- 
mouthed sergeants — tyrants and bullies in a good cause 

— until they became automata at the word of command, 

6 



70 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

lost their souls, as it seemed, in that grin ding-machine of 
military training, and cursed their fate. Only comrade- 
ship helped them — not always jolly, if they happened to 
be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul- 
mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but 
splendid if they were in their own crowd of decent, laugh- 
ter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven months' training! 
Were they ever going to the front? The war would be 
over before they landed in France. . . . Then, at last, they 
came. 

Ill 

It was not until July of 191 5 that the Commander-in- 
Chief announced that a part of the New Army was in 
France, and lifted the veil from the secret which had 
mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them, 
but who could not get a word of their doings in France. 

I saw the first of the "Kitchener men,'* as we called 
them then. The tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, 
scrunch, along a gritty road of France, passed the window 
of my billet very early in the mornings, and I poked my 
head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching 
forward to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts 
the imagination of our people will strive to conjure up 
the vision of those boys who, in the year of 191 5, went out 
to Flanders, not as conscript soldiers, but as volunteers, 
for the old country's sake, to take their risks and "do their 
bit" in the world's bloodiest war. I saw those fellows 
day by day, touched hands with them, went into the 
trenches with them, heard their first tales, and strolled 
into their billets when they had shaken down for a night 
or two within sound of the guns. History will envy me 
that, this living touch with the men who, beyond any 
doubt, did in their simple way act and sufi^er things before 
the war ended which revealed new wonders of human 
courage and endurance. Some people envied me then — 
those people at home to whom those boys belonged, and 
who in country towns and villages and suburban houses 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 71 

would have given their hearts to get one look at them 
there in Flanders and to see the way of their life. . . , 
How were they living? How did they like it ? How were 
they sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New 
Army? 

*'0h, a very cheerful lot," said a sergeant-major of the 
old Regular type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half- 
penny paper in a shed at the back of some farm buildings 
in the neighborhood of Armentieres, which had been 
plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day 
before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other 
side would take it into their heads to empty their guns 
that way. They had already killed a lot of civilians 
thereabouts, but the others stayed on.) 

*'Not a bit of trouble with them," said the sergeant- 
major, "and all as keen as when they grinned into a re- 
cruitmg office and said, Tm going.' They're glad to be 
out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten months we've 
been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were 
willing enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, 
though some more famous. . . . Till we get our chance, 
you know." 

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door 
of an old barn, where a party of his men were resting. 

"You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no 
cold feet. I'll bet on that." 

The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for 
pillows, or squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. 
From a far corner came a whistling trio, harmonized in a 
tune which for some reason made me think of hayfields 
in southern England. 

They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, "Any 
one here from Burpham?" 

One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of 
his yellow hair, and said, "Yes." 

I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was 
astonished that I should know them. Distressed also in 
a queer way. Those memories of a Sussex village seemed 



72 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

to break down some of the hardness in which he had 
cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his 
blue eyes. 

"P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham," he said in a 
kind of whisper, so that the other men should not hear. 

The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and 
Sussex villages. They were of Saxon breed. There was 
hardly a difference between them and some German pris- 
oners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair, 
freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad 
to be out in France. Anything was better than training 
at home, 

"I like Germans more 'n sergeant-majors," said one 
young yokel, and the others shouted with laughter at his 
jest. 

''Perhaps you haven't met the German sergeants," I 
said. 

"I've met our'n," said the Sussex boy. "A man's a 
fool to be a soldier. Eh, lads?" 

They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers. 

"Not that we're skeered," said one of them. "We'll 
be glad when the fighting begins." 

"Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't for- 
get the shells last night." 

There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of 
the South Saxons were full of spirit. In their yokel way 
they were disguising their real thoughts — their fear of 
being afraid, their hatred of the thought of death — very 
close to them now — and their sense of strangeness in this 
scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their 
old life. 

The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a 
bronzed man with a grizzled mustache and light-blue 
eyes, with a fine tenderness in his smile. 

"These boys of mine are all right," he said. "They're 
dear fellows, and^ ready for anything. Of course, it was 
anxious work at first, but my N. C. O.'s are a first-class 
lot, and we're ready for business." 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 73 

He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the 
business eleven months ago. It had not been easy, among 
all those scattered villages of the southern county. He 
had gone hunting among the farms and cottages for likely 
young fellows. They were of good class, and he had 
picked the lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. 
They came from a good stock — the yeoman breed. One 
could not ask for better stuff. The officers were men of 
old county families, and they knew their men. That was 
a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with 
regard to casualties, though it was unfortunate that a 
company commander, a fine fellow who had been a school- 
master and a parson, should have been picked off by a 
sniper on his first day out. 

The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though 
nothing very fierce as yet. They were led on in easy 
stages to the danger-zone. It was not fair to plunge 
them straight away into the bad places. But the test of 
steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the 
reserve trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there 
was a bit of digging to do in the open. 

"Quiet there, boys," said the sergeant-major. "And 
no larks." 

It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no 
moon, and a light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's 
trenches were about a thousand yards away, and their 
guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came over- 
head, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English 
woods now heard stranger night-birds crying through the 
air, with the noise of rushing wings, ending in a thunder- 
clap. 

**And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!" said 
the heir to a seaside lodging-house. 

"Thirsty work, this grave-digging job," said a lad who 
used to skate on rollers between the bath-chairs of 
Brighton promenade. 

"Can't see much in those shells," said a young man 
who once sold ladies' blouses in an emporium of a south 



74 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 



coast village. "How those newspaper chaps do try to 
frighten us!" 

He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk. 

"What's that? Wasps?" 

A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, 
sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a 
steady rattle in the throat of a beast. 

"What's that, Sergeant?" 

"Machine-guns, my child. Keep your head down, or 
you'll lose hold of it. . . . Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, 
now!" 

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious 
damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree 
which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and 
fall over it in a crumpled way. 

"Get up, Charlie," said the comrade next to him; and 
then, in a scared voice, "Oh, Sergeant!" 

"That's all right," said the sergeant-major. "We're 
getting off very lightly. Now remember what I've been 
telling you. . . . Stretcher this way." 

They were very steady through the night, this first 
company of the New Army. 

"Like old soldiers, sir," said the sergeant-major, when 
he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast. 

It was a bit of bad luck — though not very bad, after all 
— ^which made the Germans shell a hamlet into which I 
went just as some of the New Army were marching through 
to their quarters. These men had already seen what shell- 
fire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and 
quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or 
two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their 
attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation 
of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in 
garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside 
themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the 
process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal 
clatter as shells burst at the other end of the street, 
tumbling down huge masses of masonry and plugging 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 75 

holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of 
red-brick walls. 

" Funny business!" said one of the boys. 

"Regular Drury Lane melodrama," said another. 

"Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for 
lunch," was another comment, greeted by a guffaw along 
the line. 

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a 
false note in some of the jokes. But it was the heroic 
falsity of boys whose pride is stronger than their fear, that 
inevitable fear which chills one when this beastliness is 
being done. 

"Not a single casualty," said one of the officers when 
the storm of shells ended with a few last concussions and a 
rumble of falling bricks. "Anything wrong with our luck ? " 

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion 
of the New Army in its first experience of war on the first 
night in the danger-zone. No damage was done even 
when two shells came into one of their billets, where a 
number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long 
march. 

"I woke up pretty quick," said one of them, "and 
thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before 
the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a heavy sleeper, 
you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My 
mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Per- 
haps you'll be down for breakfast now,' she said. But 
a shell is better — as a knocker-up. I didn't stop to dress." 

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed 
at the fluke of his escape. 

"K.'s men" had not forgotten how to laugh after those 
eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in 
grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive 
men. 

"Any room for us there?" asked one of these bronzed 
fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery 
where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above 
the churchyard wall. 



76 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the 
German trenches," was the answer he had from the lad 
at his side. They grinned at their own wit. 

IV 

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the 
rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant 
nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom 
patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France 
on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent 
about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for 
which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial 
power. Any illusion to "The Empire" left them stone- 
cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hail, 
when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not 
because they hated Germans, because after a few turns 
in the trenches many of them had a fellow-feeling for the 
poor devils over the way, and to the end of the war 
treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot 
blood) like pet m^onkeys or tame bears. But for stringent 
regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy 
at the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 19 14, 
to the great scandal of G. H. Q. "What's patriotism?" 
asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in 
his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down 
in the roots of their hearts, and, as with a boy who came 
from the village where I lived for a time, the name of some 
such place held all the meaning of life to many of them. 
The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went 
back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where 
their parents sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept 
with its head on its paws. The smell of the fields and the 
barns, the friendship of familiar trees, the heritage that 
was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched 
them with the spirit of England, and it was because of 
that they fought. 

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 77 

glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid 
his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and 
cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the 
pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his day- 
dreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to 
the Bank, the lights of the embankment reflected in the 
dark river, the back yard where he had kept his bicycle, 
or the suburban garden where he had watered his 
mother's plants. . . . London! Good old London! . . . 
His heart ached for it sometimes when, as sentry, he 
stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No Man's 
Land. 

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wander- 
ing down the lane a way, I heard the sound of singing 
coming from a big brick barn on the roadside. I stood 
close under the blank wall at the back of the building, 
and listened. The men were singing "Auld Lang Syne" 
to the accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. 
They were taking parts, and the old tune — so strange to 
hear out in a village of France, in the war zone — sounded 
very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the 
concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army 
sang "God Save the King." I heard it sung a thousand 
times or more on royal festivals and tours, but listening 
to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders, where a 
number of "K.'s men" lay on the straw a night or two 
away from the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they 
had to take their turn, I heard it with more emotion than 
ever before. In that anthem, chanted by these boys in 
the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been 
king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of 
Agincourt, where his men lay sleeping, I should have 
been glad to stand and listen outside that barn and hear 
those words: 

Send him victorious, 
Happy and glorious. 



78 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received 
his tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to 
fight for the flag that meant to them some old village on 
the Sussex Downs, where a mother and a sweetheart 
waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls 
were placarded with posters which made the Germans 
gibe, or old London, where the 'buses went clanging down 
the Strand. 

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, 
and I heard the click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s 
men, standing sentry outside the camp. 

"Who goes there?" 

It was a cockney voice. 

"Friends." 

"Pass, friends. All's well." 

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the 
spirit of a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of 
high explosives and destructive chemistry. The fighting 
in front of these lads of the New Army decided the fate 
of the world, and it was the valor of those young soldiers 
who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and killed 
in great numbers, which made all things different in the 
philosophy of modern life. That concertina in the barn 
was playing the music of an epic which will make those 
who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to the future 
race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. 
Yet it was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham Junction or 
Peckham Rye, who said, like a voice of Fate, "All's well." 



When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons 
in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the 
enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder 
and in supplies of ammunition he was our master all along 
the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over 
large numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which 
caused a heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 79 

were strictly limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed 
bitterly because they could not "answer back." In 
March of 191 5 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open 
fire. We called this monster "grandma," and there was 
a little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kem- 
mel, to see the effect of the first shell. Its target was on 
the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some 
trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by 
our generals and by God. Preliminary to the attack our 
field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over 
the German trenches — ^their formidable earthworks with 
deep, shell-proof dugouts — like the glitter of confetti, 
and had no more effect than that before the infantry made 
a rush for the enemy's line and were mown down by 
machine-gun fire — ^the Germans were very strong in 
machine-guns, and we were very weak — in the usual way 
of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster 
howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as of 
thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds 
later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black 
column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze 
clawed at it and tore it to tatters. 

"Some shell!" said an officer. "Now we ought to win 
the war — I don't think!" 

Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two) — 
"aunty," as we called it. 

Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, 
and gradually our gun-power grew and grew, until we 
could "answer back," and give more than came to us; 
but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket, 
as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire, 
having their trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, 
and their bodies broken, at all times and in all places 
within range of German guns. 

Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had 
observation of our position. From the Westhook Ridge 
and the Pilkem Ridge his observers watched every move- 
ment of our men round Ypres, and along the main road 



8o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of 
them were visible. From the Wytschaete Ridge (White- 
sheet, as we called it) and Messines they could see for 
miles across our territory, not only the trenches, but the 
ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them 
and the roads through the villages. They looked straight 
into Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when 
our men crouched among its ruins and opened the graves 
in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and vivid 
to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the 
gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from 
Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the 
ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the roads to Vier- 
straat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of white 
dust which would tell them when men were marching by 
— more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve 
Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In 
cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with shells 
to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated 
barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick 
about great holes. They shelled the roads down which 
our transport wagons went at night, and the communi- 
cation trenches to which our men moved up to the front 
lines, and gun - positions revealed by every flash, and 
dugouts foolishly frail against their 5.9's, which in those 
early days we could only answer by a few pip-squeaks. 
They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our 
men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places 
became sinister with remembered horror and present 
fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the 
farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the 
Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm 
and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres. 

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in 
those places, searched along those roads, lived in ditches 
and dugouts there, under constant fire. In wet holes 
along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young officers who had 
known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 8i 

their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the 
clammy walls. They bought Kirchner prints of little 
ladies too lightly clad for the climate of Flanders, and 
pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty feminine side 
of life which here was banished. They brought broken 
chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, 
"It's quite cozy, after all!" 

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street 
clubs, in the same tone of voice, with the same courtesy 
and sense of humor — ^while they listened to noises with- 
out, and wondered whether it would be to-day or to- 
morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speak- 
ing, that bits of steel would smash through that mud 
above their heads and tear them to bits and make a mess 
of things. 

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat 
in one of these holes, like many others. A nice, gentle 
fellow, fond of music, a fine judge of wine, a connoisseur 
of old furniture and good food. It was cruelty to put 
such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses 
of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the 
little luxuries of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he 
refused to sink into the squalor. He put on pajamas at 
night before sleeping in his bunk — silk pajamas — and 
while v/aiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of 
gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew 
out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap 
of earth and timber. He crawled out, cursing loudly 
with a nice choice of language, and then lit another gold- 
tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast. 
His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old tradi- 
tions of service to an officer of the Guards, and he provided 
excellent little meals, done to a turn, until something else 
happened, and he was buried alive within a few yards of 
his master. . . . Whenever I went to the canal-bank, and 
I went there many times (when still and always hungry 
high velocities came searching for a chance meal), I 
thought of my friend in the Guards, and of other men I 



82 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

knew who had lived there In the worst days, and some 
of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank 
and dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and 
there was the laughter of men who hid the fear in their 
hearts and were "game" until some bit of steel plugged 
them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to tatters. 



VI 

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our 
men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were 
wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. 
In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi, 
and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many 
other evil places. The enemy drained his water into our 
ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science 
of his way of war, and that made our men savage. 

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on 
an August day in '15. It was the seventeenth of August, 
as I have it in my diary, and the episode is vivid in my 
mind because I saw then the New Army lads learning 
one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I 
also learned the sense of humor of a British general, and 
afterward, not enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of 
officers and men (in civil life a year before) who lived with 
the knowledge that the ground beneath them was mined 
and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to 
eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette. 

We were sitting in the garden of the general's head- 
quarters, having a picnic meal before going into the 
trenches. In spite of the wasps, which attacked the sand- 
wiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war. No shell 
came crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well 
within range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise 
was the drop of an over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later 
on a shrill whistle signaled a hostile airplane overhead, 
but it passed without throwing a bomb. 

" You will have a moist time in some of the trenches," 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 83 

said the general (whose boots were finely polished). 
"The rain has made them rather damp. . . . But you 
must get down as far as the mine craters. We're ex- 
pecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and 
some of our trenches are only six yards away from the 
enemy. It's an interesting place." 

The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good 
thing, and I uttered a pious prayer that the enemy 
would not explode his beastly mine under me. It makes 
such a mess of a man. 

A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: 
"The sound of picks has been heard close to our sap-head. 
The enemy will probably explode their mine in a few 
hours." 

"That's the place I was telling you about," said the 
general. "It's well worth a visit. . . . But you miust make 
up your mind to get your feet wet." 

As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed 
to my shoulders, I was ready to brave the perils of wet 
feet with any man. 

It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I re- 
member thinking that in London — which seemed a long 
way off — people were going about under umbrellas and 
looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing 
omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and 
showed their pretty ankles, (Those things used to hap- 
pen in the far-ofi' days of peace.) But in the trenches, 
those that lay low, rain meant something different, and 
hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our 
soldiers, who cursed the rain — as in the old days, "they 
swore terribly in Flanders" — did not tuck their clothes 
up above their ankles. They took off their trousers. 

There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the 
sight of those hefty men coming back through the com- 
munication trenches with the tails of their shirts flapping 
above their bare legs, which were plastered with a yellow- 
ish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they 
trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the 



84 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

boots which they wore without socks squelched at every 
step with a loud, sucking noise — 'Mike a German drinking 
soup," said an officer who preceded me. 

"Why grouse?" he said, presently. "It's better than 
Brighton ! " 

It was a queer experience, this paddling through the 
long communication trenches, which wound in and out 
like the Hampton Court maze toward the front line, and 
the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by a 
place called the "Tambour." Shells came whining over- 
head and somewhere behind us iron doors were slamming 
in the sky, with metallic bangs, as though opening and 
shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rille-shots 
showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and 
once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my 
knees, listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of 
invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil. 

It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards 
away from my head, which I ducked below the trench 
parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with 
a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top- 
boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from 
a side-slip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to 
some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. 
Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and 
breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about 
his elegant legs. 

"Clever fellows!" said the officer, as two of us climbed 
on to the fire-stand of the trench in order to avo'd a 
specially deep water-hole, and with ducked heads and 
bodies bent double (the Germans were only two hundred 
yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry 
earth for at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was 
loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was 
an abrupt descent into a slough of despond. 

"And I hope they can swim!" said an ironical voice 
from a dugout, as the officers passed. They were lying 
in wet mud in those square burrows, the men who had 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 85 

been working all night under their platoon commanders, 
and were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwell- 
ings. As I paddled on I glanced at those men lying on 
straw which gave out a moist smell, mixed with the pun- 
gent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not interested 
in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose 
of "hate" to the village of Becourt-Becordel. The noise 
did not interrupt their heavy, slumbrous breathing. 
Some of those who were awake were reading novelettes, 
forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance. 
Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their 
knees tucked up, staring gloomily to the opposite wall of 
the trench in day-dreams of some places betwixt Aber- 
deen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them, and 
said, "How are you getting on.?" He answered, "I'm 
not getting on. ... I don't see the fun of this." 

"Can you keep dry?" 

"Dry.? . . . I'm soaked to the skin." 

"What's it like here?" 

"It's hell. . . . The devils blow up mines to make things 
worse." 

Another boy spoke. 

"Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a 
gloomy bastard. Doesn't believe in his luck." 

There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their 
dugouts — a woman's face carved in chalk, the name of 
a girl written in pebbles, a portrait of the King in a frame 
of withered wild flowers. 

A company of our New Army boys had respected a 
memento of French troops who were once in this section 
of trenches. It was an altar built into the side of the 
trench, where mass was said each morning by a soldier- 
priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, 
and above the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, 
upon the base of which I read the words Notre Dame des 
Tranchees ("Our Lady of the Trenches"). A tablet fast- 
ened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of 
those who worshiped here: 



86 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, 
was blessed by the chaplain of the French regiment. The 
9th Squadron of the 6th Company recommends its care 
and preservation to their successors. Please do not touch 
the fragile statue in trench-clay." 

"Our Lady of the Trenches!" It was the first time I 
had heard of this new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, 
if she visited those ditches of death, must have wept with 
pity for all those poor children of mankind whose faith 
was so unlike the work they had to do. 

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling 
music. A young soldier was playing the mandolin to 
two comrades. "All the latest ragtime," said one of 
them with a grin. 

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and 
then over the parapets at the German lines a few hundred 
yards away, and at a village in which the enemy was in- 
trenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through 
which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming 
frogs. Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, 
and queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled 
along dry ledges and invaded the dugouts in search of 
the vermin which infested them. 

"Rats are the worst plague," said a colonel, coming 
out of the battalion headquarters, where he had a hole 
large enough for a bed and table. "There are thousands 
of rats in this part of the line, and they're audacious 
devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night 
writhes with them. ... I don't mind the mice so much. 
One of them comes to dinner on my table every evening, 
a friendly little beggar who is very pally with me." 

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of 
tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the 
enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where 
our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to 
any little tapping or picking which might signal approach- 
ing upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown 
up long ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 87 

of the chicory flower growing in the churned-up soil. . . , 
The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up to the 
time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and 
I wondered whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. 
There was a foreknowledge of death in his eyes. 

One of the officers had spoken to me privately. 

"I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It 
haunts me, that thought. The shelling is bad enough, 
but it's the mining business that wears one's nerve to 
shreds. One never knows." 

I hated to leave him there to his agony. . . . The colonel 
himself was all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much 
as the shell-fire and the mining, those big, lean, hungry 
rats of the trenches, who invaded the dugouts and frisked 
over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern 
was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, 
seeing the glint of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet 
from his revolver ricocheted from wall to wall, and he 
was nearly court-martialed for having fired. 

The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, 
the water-logged trenches, the shell-fire which broke down 
the parapets and buried men in wet mud, wetter for their 
blood, the German snipers waiting for English heads, and 
then the mines — oh, a cheery little school of courage for 
the sons of gentlemen ! A gentle academy of war for the 
devil and General Squeers! 

VII 

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in 
Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and 
the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises 
there or its remnants of ruin stay as a memorial of dread- 
ful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of those 
men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the 
fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts. 

I went through Ypres so many times in early days and 
late days of the war that I think I could find my way 



88 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

about it blindfold, even now. I saw it first in March of 
191 5, before the battle when the Germans first used poi- 
son-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French 
and British soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of 
masonry. On that first visit I found it scarred by shell- 
fire, and its great Cloth Hall was roofless and licked out 
by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the buildings 
were still standing and the shops were busy with custom- 
ers in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small 
booths served by the women and girls who sold picture 
post-cards and Flemish lace and fancy cakes and soap to 
British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of 
what might happen here in this city, so close to the 
enemy's lines, so close to his guns. I had tea in a bun- 
shop, crowded with young officers, who were served by 
two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the English 
money they were making. 

A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first 
sign of his work was when a mass of French soldiers and 
colored troops, and English, Irish, Scottish, and Cana- 
dian soldiers came staggering through the Lille and 
Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell 
upon them. They were gasping for breath, vomiting, 
falling into unconsciousness, and, as they lay, their lungs 
were struggling desperately against some stifling thing. 
A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a 
sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and 
then gasped and lurched as they ran and fell. It was 
after that when shells came in hurricane flights over 
Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them on fire, 
until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds 
of civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried 
there. Others crawled into a big drain-pipe — there were 
wounded women and children among them, and a young 
French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to 
help them — and they stayed there three days and nights, 
in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bom- 
bardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 89 

fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral 
smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of 
masonry that had been their buttresses and towers. 

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it 
stood through the years of the war that followed, chang- 
ing only in the disintegration of its ruin as broken walls 
became more broken and fallen houses were raked into 
smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was 
never a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled. 

The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poper- 
inghe and passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe 
church, beyond Goldfish Chateau. . . . For a long time 
Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men and 
women could move freely without hiding from the pur- 
suit of death; and even there, from time to time, there 
were shells from long-range guns and, later, night-birds 
dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about Poperinghe, 
by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, 
taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised 
clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flem- 
ish cart-horses with huge fringes of knotted string wended 
their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers. Often 
the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy 
clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers 
of Flemish churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge 
and Mont Noir, whose sails have turned through centuries 
of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as I write 
— that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of 
the roads and fields where the traffic of war went up, 
month after month, year after year. 

That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was 
strangely quiet, I remember. There was ** nothing do- 
ing," as our men used to say. The German gunners 
seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming 
day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of 
war under every old hedge. 

"What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?" 
asked one of my companions. There were three of us. 



90 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the vil- 
lage which then — they were early days! — looked a peace- 
ful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine above its gray 
thatch and red-tiled roofs. 

Suddenly one of us said, "Good God!" 

An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the 
sky and the hamlet into which we were just going was 
blotted out by black smoke, which came up from its cen- 
ter as though its market-place had opened up and vomited 
9ut infernal vapors. 

"A big shell that!" said one man, a tall, lean-Hmbed 
officer, who later in the war was sniper-in-chief of the 
British army. Something enraged him at the sight of 
that shelled village. 

"Damn them!" he said. "Damn the war! Damn all 
dirty dogs who smash up life!" 

Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there 
had been a minute or so between us and Dickebusch. 
(In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend from Fleet Street 
was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the 
day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the 
way to Ypres. The German gunners had wakened up 
again. They always did. They were getting busy, those 
house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes 
through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the 
ditch, we ate the luncheon we had carried in our pockets. 

"A silly idea!" said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad 
look in his eyes. He was Norman-Irish, and a man of 
letters, and a crack shot, and all the boys he knew were 
being killed. 

"What's silly?" I asked, wondering what particular 
foolishness he was thinking of, in a world of folly. 

"Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's 
mouth, just because some German fellow, some fat, stupid 
man a few miles away, looses off a bit of steel in search of 
the bodies of men with whom he has no personal ac- 
quaintance." 

"Damn silly," I said. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 91 

"That's all there is to it in modern warfare," said the 
lanky man. "It's not like the old way of fighting, body 
to body. Your strength against your enemy's, your cun- 
ning against his. Now it is mechanics and chemistry. 
What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when 
guns kill at fifteen miles?" 

Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised 
tricks to make him show his head, and shot each head 
that showed. 

The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all 
was quiet again. It was horribly quiet on our way into 
Ypres, across the railway, past the red-brick asylum, 
where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls, past 
the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not re- 
assuring, as our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on 
our way into Ypres. The enemy had been shelling heavily 
for three-quarters of an hour in the morning. There was 
no reason why he should not begin again. ... I remember 
now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after 
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking 
up at the charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great 
solitude of ruin. No living figure stirred among the piles 
of masonry which were tombstones above many dead. 
We three were like travelers who had come to some 
capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe 
and uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient splendor, 
with broken traces of peoples who once had lived here in 
security. I looked up at the blue sky above those white 
ruins, and had an idea that death hovered there like a 
hawk ready to pounce. Even as one of us (not I) spoke 
the thought, the signal came. It was a humming drone 
high up in the sky. 

"Look out!" said the lanky man. "Germans!" 

It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande 
Place were hostile things, because suddenly white pufF- 
balls burst all round them, as the shrapnel of our own 
guns scattered about them. But they flew round steadily 
in a half-circle until they were poised above our heads. 



92 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

It v/as time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just 
there, where masses of stonework were piled high. At 
any moment things might drop. I ducked my head 
behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill "coo-ee!" 
from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup 
was flung against a bit of wall close to where the lanky 
man sat in a shell-hole. He picked it up and said, 
"Queer!" and then smelled it, and said "Queer!" again. 
It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poison- 
ous liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs 
were dropping round as the two hostile airmen circled 
overhead, untouched still by the following shell-bursts. 
Then they passed toward their own lines, and my friend 
in the shell-hole called to me and said, "Let's be going." 

It was time to go. 

When we reached the edge of the town our guns away 
back started shelling, and we knew the Germans would 
answer. So we sat in a field nearby to watch the bom- 
bardment. The air moved with the rushing waves which 
tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over 
Ypres came the high singsong of the enemies' answering 
voice. 

As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vla- 
mertinghe, a movement of transport wagons and march- 
ing men. They were going up in the darkness through 
Ypres — rations and reliefs. They were the New Army 
men of the West Riding. 

"Carry on there," said a young officer at the head of 
his company. Something in his eyes startled me. Was 
it fear, or an act of sacrifice? I wondered if he would be 
killed that night. Men were killed most nights on the 
way through Ypres, sometimes a few and sometimes 
many. One shell killed thirty one night, and their bodies 
lay strewn, headless and limbless, at the corner of the 
Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped their way 
through, between bursts of shell-fire, hoping to dodge 
them, and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter 
of their wheels and shafts, and the bodies of the drivers. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 93 

and the raw flesh of the dead horses that had not dodged 
them. Many men were buried ahve in Ypres, under 
masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, 
and were wakened by the avalanche above them. Com- 
rades tried to dig them out, to pull away great stones, to 
get down to those vaults below from which voices were 
calling; and while they worked other shells came and 
laid dead bodies above the stones which had entombed 
their living comrades. That happened, not once or twice, 
but many times in Ypres. 

There was a Town Major of Ypres, Men said it was 
a sentence of death to any officer appointed to that job. 
I think one of them I met had had eleven predecessors. 
He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of sand- 
bags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very 
long at a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate 
the traffic according to the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' 
book as a hobby, until it was buried under piles of prison, 
and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the menace 
of death always about him. 



VIII 

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in 
those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eye- 
witness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea. 

"It would be a great adventure," he said, as we stood 
listening to the gun-fire over there. 

"It would be damn silly," said a stafF-officer. "Only 
a stern sense of duty would make me do it." 

It was Gullett who was the brave man. 

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a 
gift to any battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, 
and were sorry for ourselves Vv^hen we failed to find it, nor, 
for a long time, any living soul. 

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stum- 
bled over the broken stones. No other footstep paced 
down any of those streets of shattered houses through 



94 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

which we wandered with tightened nerves. There was 
no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen 
masonry and twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of 
a sepulcher which had been once a fair city. 

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande 
Place, not speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath 
the last flame-feathers of the sinking sun and the first 
stars that ghmmered in a pale sky, the frightful beauty 
of the ruins put a spell upon us. 

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the frame- 
work of broken arches and single pillars, like a white rock 
which had been split from end to end by a thunderbolt. 
A recent shell had torn out a slice so that the top of the 
tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and 
the great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. 
The Cloth Hall was but a skeleton in stone, with immense 
gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of its former majesty. 
Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's was a stark ruin, which 
gleamed white through the darkening twilight. 

We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins 
of Westminster Abbey, while the shadows of night crept 
into their dark caverns and into their yawning chasms of 
chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their riven 
towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of 
isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place 
at Ypres my friend and I stood like the last men on earth 
in a city of buried life. 

It was almost dark now as we made our way through 
other streets of rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I 
remember, many of the iron lamp-posts had been left 
standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken way, 
and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers 
and plants still growing in gardens which had not been 
utterly destroyed by the daily tempest of shells, though 
the houses about them had been all wrecked. 

The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn 
by these storms, and in the darkness, lightened faintly by 
the crescent moon, we stumbled over broken branches 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 95 

and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken now 
by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped 
sideways with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be 
the signal for our batteries, and shell after shell went rush- 
ing through the night, with that long, menacing hiss 
which ends in a dull blast. 

The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells 
followed each other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, 
echoed back by the ruins of Ypres in hollow, reverberating 
thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering back, not 
very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or 
about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses 
or of huge blocks of stone splitting into fragments. 

We groped along, scared with the sense of death around 
us. The first flares of the night were being lighted by 
both sides above their trenches on each side of the salient. 
The balls of light rose into the velvety darkness and a 
moment later suff'used the sky with a white glare which 
faded away tremulously after half a minute. 

Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees 
along the roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as 
ink, and the fields between Ypres and the trenches were 
flooded with a milky luminance. The whole shape of the 
salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could see 
all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. 
We stared across the fields beyond the Menin road 
toward the Hooge crater, and those trenches which were 
battered to pieces but not abandoned in the first battle 
of Ypres and the second battle. 

That salient was, even then, in 191 5, a graveyard of 
British soldiers — there were years to follow when many 
more would lie there — and as between flash and flash the 
scene was revealed, I seemed to see a great army of ghosts, 
the spirits of all those boys who had died on this ground. 
It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our 
loneliness here on the ramparts, which put an edge to 
my nerves and made me see unnatural things. 

No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two 



96 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

figures approaching him through a clump of trees. His 
words rang out hke pistol-shots. 

"Halt! Who goes there?" 

"Friends!" we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a 
shaking bayonet. 

"Come close to be recognized!" he said, and his voice 
was harsh. 

We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sen- 
tries sometimes shot too soon. 

"Who are you.?" he asked, in a more natural voice, and 
when we explained he laughed gruffly. "I never saw 
two strangers pass this way before!" 

He was an old soldier, "back to the army again," with 
Kitchener's men. He had been in the Chitral campaign 
and South Africa — "Little wars compared to this," as he 
said. A fine, simple man, and although a bricklayer's 
laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right word. 
I was struck when he said that the German flares were 
more "luminous" than ours. I could hardly see his face 
in the darkness, except when he struck a match once, but 
his figure was black against the illumined sky, and I 
watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the roads 
up which his comrades had gone to the support of another 
battalion at Hooge, who were hard pressed. "They went 
along under a lot of shrapnel and had many casualties." 

He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful 
way, with phrases of almost biblical beauty in their simple 
truth, and the soul of the man, the spirit of the whole 
army in which he was a private soldier, was revealed when 
he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, " But 
the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!" 

We wandered away again into the darkness, with the 
din of the bombardment all about us. There was not a 
square yard of ground unplowed by shells and we did 
not nourish any false illusions as to finding a safe spot 
for a bivouac. 

There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where 
a man might say "No shells will fall here." But one 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 97 

place we found where there seemed some reasonable odds 
of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might curl 
up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not 
be "crumped" before the dawn. There were several of 
these shelters there, but, peering into them by the light 
of a match, I shuddered at the idea of lying in one of them. 
They had been long out of use and there was a foul look 
about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to 
rot there. They were inhabited already by half-wild cats 
— ^the abandoned cats of Ypres, which hunted mice 
through the ruins of their old houses — and they spat at 
me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match 
into their lairs. 

There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on 
which we put our cake and Cointreau, and here, through 
half a night, my friend and I sat watching and listening 
to that weird scene upon which the old moon looked 
down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked 
over all the problems of life and death and the meaning 
of man's heritage. 

Another sentry challenged us — all his nerves jangled at 
our apparition. He was a young fellow, one of " Kitchen- 
er's crowd," and told us frankly that he had the *'jim- 
jams" in this solitude of Ypres and "saw Germans'* 
every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us — "for 
company." 

It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes 
damp. Cake and sweet liquor were poor provisions for 
the night, and the thought of hot tea was infinitely seduc- 
tive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few soldiers 
round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our 
way along, holding our breath at times as a shell came 
sweeping overhead or burst with a sputter of steel against 
the ramparts. It was profoundly dark, so that only the 
glowworms glittered like jewels on black velvet. The 
moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of the 
distant flares only glimmered faintly above the broken 
walls. In a tunnel of darkness voices were speaking and 



98 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

some one was whistling softly, and a gleam of red light 
made a bar across the grass. We walked toward a group 
of black figures, suddenly silent at our approach — obvi- 
ously startled. 

"Who's there?" said a voice. 

We were just in time for tea — a stroke of luck — ^with a 
company of boys (all Kitchener lads from the Civil Ser- 
vice), who were spending the night here. 1 hey had made 
a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort and 
frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense 
of humor, cynical and blasphemous, but even through 
their jokes there was a yearning for the end of a business 
which was too close to death. 

I remember the gist of their conversation, which was 
partly devised for my benefit. One boy declared that he 
was sick of the whole business. 

"I should like to cancel my contract,*' he remarked. 

"Yes, send in your resignation, old lad," said another, 
with ironical laughter. 

"They'd consider it, wouldn't they? P'raps offer a 
rise in wages — I don't think!" 

Another boy said, "I am a citizen of no mean Empire, 
but what the hell is the Empire going to do for me when 
the next shell blows off both my bleeding legs?" 

This remark was also received by a gust of subdued 
laughter, silenced for a moment by a roar and upheaval 
of masonry somewhere by the ruins of the Cloth Hall. 

"Soldiers are prisoners," said a boy without any trace 
of humor. "You're lagged, and you can't escape. A 
*blighty' is the best luck you can hope for." 

"I don't want to kill Germans," said a fellow with a 
superior accent. "I've no personal quarrel against them, 
and, anyhow, I don't like butcher's work." 

"Christian service, that's what the padre calls it. I 
wonder if Christ would have stuck a bayonet into a Ger- 
man stomach — a German with his hands up. That's 
what we're asked to do." 

"Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 99 

mention it? This is war, and we're back to the primitive 
state — B.C. All the same, I say my little prayers when 
I'm in a blue funk. 

" Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. 
Look upon a little child." 

This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, re- 
ceived with much hilarity, not too loud, for fear of draw- 
ing fire — though really no Germans could have heard any 
laughter in Ypres. 

Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We 
called on him, and found him sitting alone in a dugout 
furnished by odd bits from the wrecked houses, with waxen 
flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and an old cottage 
clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair 
which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a 
Devonshire lad, with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was 
sorry for him in his loneliness, with a roof over his head 
which would be no proof against a fair-sized shell. 

He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would 
not have been surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black 
Prince had called on him. He would have greeted him 
with the same politeness and oflPered him his green arm- 
chair. 

The night passed. The guns slackened down before 
the dawn. For a little while there was almost silence, 
even over the trenches. But as the first faint glow of 
dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst out 
again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new 
spasms of ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the 
Germans facing them, had an attack of the nerves, as 
always at that hour. 

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look 
of belated fireworks after a night of orgy. 

In a distant field a cock crew. 

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept 
away from the ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreck- 



loo NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

age of the city was revealed again nakedly. Then the 
guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude in the 
trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went 
two tired figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swift- 
ness to escape the early morning "hate" which was sure 
to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe still working in 
a ruined tower chimed the hour of six. 

I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and 
during the battles of Flanders saw it day by day as col- 
umns of men and guns and pack-mules and transports 
went up toward the ridge which led at last to Passchen- 
daele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round 
about, and they fired with violent concussions which 
shook loose stones, and their flashes were red through the 
Flanders mist. Always this capital of the battlefields 
was sinister, with the sense of menace about. 

"Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert." 
So said the traffic man at the crossroads. 
As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened 
the strap of one's gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched 
one's soul icily. 

IX 

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, 
in those early days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That 
was the devil's playground and his chamber of horrors, 
wherein he devised merry tortures for young Christian 
men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin 
road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary 
Wood. For a time there was a chateau there called the 
White Chateau, with excellent stables and good accom- 
modation for one of our brigade staffs, until one of our 
generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which 
broke up their conference. Afterward there was no 
chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sand- 
bags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water 
slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying 
pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE loi 

green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, 
were floating on the surface of that water below the crater 
banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. 
Our men lived there and died there within a few yards of 
the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed 
in the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in 
legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, 
was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get 
deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead 
bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, 
booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling 
over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position 
or blew up a new mine-shaft. 

I remember one young Irish officer who came down to 
our quarters on a brief respite from commanding the 
garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome fellow, like 
young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a pro- 
found melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile. 

"Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you.?" he 
asked. 

He walked about in the open air until the bath was 
ready. Even there a strong, fetid smell came from him. 

"Hooge," he said, in a thoughtful way, "is not a health 
resort." 

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel 
quite such a leper. He told one or two stories about the 
things that happened at Hooge, and I wondered if hell 
could be so bad. After a short stay he went back again, 
and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before 
saying good-by he touched some flowers on the mess- 
table, and for a moment or two listened to birds twitter- 
ing in the trees. 

"Thanks very much," he said. "I've enjoyed this 
visit a good deal. . . . Good-by." 

He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, 
and the mine-crater where his Irish soldiers were lying in 
slime, in which vermin crawled. 

Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our 



I02 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

position, blowing a few men to bits and scattering the 
sand-bags. Sometimes it was our men who upheaved 
the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the 
new crater. 

It was in July of '15 that the devils of Hooge became 
merry and bright with increased activity. The Germans 
had taken possession of one of the mine-craters which 
formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road, 
with trenches running down to it on either side, so that 
it was like the spear-head of their position. They had 
fortified it with sand-bags and crammed it with machine- 
guns which could sweep the ground on three sides, so 
making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise. 
Our trenches immediately faced this stronghold from the 
other side of a road at right angles with the Menin road, 
and our men — the New Army boys — ^were shelled day 
and night, so that many of them were torn to pieces, and 
others buried alive, and others sent mad by shell-shock. 
(They were learning their lessons in the school of courage.) 
It was decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, 
to clear out this hornets' nest, and the job was given to 
the sappers, who mined under the roadway toward the 
redoubt, while our heavy artillery shelled the enemy's 
position all around the neighborhood. 

On July 22d the mine was exploded, while our men 
crouched low, horribly afraid after hours of suspense. 
The earth was rent asunder by a gust of flame, and vom- 
ited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and 
bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell 
upon them. 

"I thought I had been blown to bits," one of them told 
me. *'I was a quaking fear, with my head in the earth. 
I kept saying, 'Christ! . . . Christ!'" 

When the earth and smoke had settled again it was 
seen that the enemy's redoubt had ceased to exist. In 
its place, where there had been a crisscross of trenches 
and sand-bag shelters for their machine-guns and a net- 
work of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 103 

hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled 
earth heaps which had blocked up the enemy's trenches 
on either side of the position, so that they could not rush 
into the cavern and take possession. It was our men 
who "rushed" the crater and lay there panting in its 
smoking soil. 

Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed 
that redoubt, and our men had it. Infuriated by a mas- 
sacre of their garrison in the mine-explosion and by the 
loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept up a furious 
bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in 
bursts of gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about 
and killed and wounded many men. Our line at Hooge 
at that time was held by the King's Royal Rifles of the 
14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in the 
training-school of war. They held on under the gunning 
of their positions, and each man among them wondered 
whether it was the shell screeching overhead or the next 
which would smash him into pulp like those bodies lying 
nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks. 

On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of 
silence after a heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of 
the K. R. R. raised their heads above broken parapets 
and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about. There 
were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men 
were wailing. The unwounded, startled by the silence, 
became aware of some moisture falling on them; thick, 
oily drops of liquid. 

"What in hell's name — ?" said a subaltern. 

One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something 
like paraffin. 

Coming across from the German trenches were men 
hunched up under some heavy weights. They were 
carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-pipes. Suddenly 
there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some 
blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to 
the broken ground where the King's Royal Rifles lay. 



I04 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Some of them were set on lire, their clothes burnmg on 
them, making them Hving torches, and in a second or 
two cinders. 

It was a new horror of war — the Flammenwerfer. 

Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired 
repeatedly at the Germans carrying the flaming jets. 
Here and there the shots were true. A man hunched 
under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught in a 
candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the 
long bombardment was too much for the rank and file, 
whose clothes were smoking and whose bodies were 
scorched. In something like a panic they fell back, 
abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay. 

The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached 
the troops in reserve, who had been resting in the rear 
after a long spell. They moved up at once to support 
their comrades and make a counter-attack. The ground 
they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many 
fell, but the others attacked again and a'gain, regardless 
of their losses, and won back part of the lost ground, 
leaving only a depth of five hundred yards in the enemy's 
hands. * 

So the position remained until the morning of August 
9th, when a new attack was begun by the Durham, York- 
shire, Lancashire, and Midland troops of the 6th Division, 
who had been long in the salient and had proved the 
quality of northern "grit" in the foul places and the foul 
weather of that region. 

It was late on the night of August 8th that these battal- 
ions took up their position, ready for the assault. These 
men, who came mostly from mines and workshops, were 
hard and steady and did not show any outward sign of 
nervousness, though they knew well enough that before 
the light of another day came their numbers would have 
passed through the lottery of this game of death. Each 
man's life depended on no more than a fluke of luck by 
the throw of those dice which explode as they fall. They 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 105 

knew what their job was. It was to cross five hundred 
yards of open ground to capture and to hold a certain 
part of the German position near the Chateau of Hooge. 

They were at the apex of the triangle which made a 
German salient after the ground was lost, on July 30th. 
On the left side of the triangle was Zouave Wood, and 
Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to a strong fort 
held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and 
every kind of bomb. The base of the upturned triangle 
was made by the Menin road, to the north, beyond which 
lay the crater, the chateau, and the stables. 

The way that lay between the regiment and their goal 
was not an easy one to pass. It was cut and crosscut by 
our old trenches, now held by the enemy, who had made 
tangles of barbed wire in front of their parapets, and had 
placed machine-guns at various points. The ground was 
littered with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 
30th, and pock-marked by deep shell-holes. To cross five 
hundred yards of such ground in the storm of the enemy's 
fire would be an ordeal greater than that of rushing from 
one trench to another. It would have to be done in 
regular attack formation, and with the best of luck would 
be a grim and costly progress. 

The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could 
only see one another as shadows blacker than the night. 
They were very quiet; each man was fighting down his 
fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves hideously 
strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, " Steady, 
lads," were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants 
and sergeants. The sounds of men whispering, a cough 
here and there, a word of command, the clink of bayonets, 
the cracking of twigs under heavy boots, the shuffle of 
troops getting into line, would not carry with any loud- 
ness to German ears. 

The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the 
preliminary bombardment which would smash a way for 
them. The officers struck matches now and then to 
glance at their wrist-vv^atches, set very carefully to those 



io6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with an 
enormous violence of shell-lire, so that the night was 
shattered with the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber 
mingled their explosions, and the long screech of the shells 
rushed through the air as though thousands of engines 
were chasing one another madly through a vast junction 
in that black vault. 

The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns 
lengthened their fuses the infantry advance would begin. 
Their nerves were getting jangled. It was just the tort- 
ure of human animals. There was an indrawing of 
breath when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets, 
sending up flares which made white waves of Hght. If 
they were seen! There would be a shambles. 

But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a 
thick veil, hiding those mining lads who stared toward 
the illuminations above the black vapors and at the 
flashes which seemed to stab great rents in the pall of 
smoke. "It was a jumpy moment," said the colonel of 
the Durhams, and the moment lengthened into minutes. 

Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the 
second which had been given for the assault to begin, and 
instantly, to the tick, the guns hfted and made a curtain 
of fire round the Chateau of Hooge, beyond the Menin 
road, six hundred yards away. 
lime! 

The company officers blew their whistles, and there was 
a sudden clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, 
and from men girdled with hand-grenades, as the ad- 
vancing companies deployed and made their first rush 
forward. The ground had been churned up by our shells, 
and the trenches had been battered into shapelessness, 
strewn with broken wire and heaps of loose stones and 
fragments of steel. 

It seemed impossible that any German should be left 
alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of 
machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. 
The bombing-parties searched and found them, and 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 107 

silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once 
been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a 
dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment 
beneath which they had crouched. 

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled 
hand-grenades, and swept the ground before them. Some 
Germans screeched like pigs in a slaughter-house. 

The men went on in short rushes. They were across 
the Menin road now, and were first to the crater, though 
other troops were advancing quickly from the left. They 
went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and hurling 
bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, 
and scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before 
rolling down again, until at least two hundred bodies lay 
dead at the bottom of this pit of hell. 

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater 
or held the dugouts already made by the enemy, others 
cHmbed up to the ridge beyond and with a final rush, 
almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit of 
their line of assault and achieved the task which had been 
set them. They were mad now, not human in their 
senses. They saw red through bloodshot eyes. They 
were beasts of prey — these decent Yorkshire lads. 

Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans 
were bayoneted, until not a single enemy lived on this 
ground, and the light of day on that 9th of August re- 
vealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent for words 
to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which 
had been a panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for 
mercy, with that dreadful screech of terror from German 
boys who saw the white gleam of steel at their stomachs 
before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham 
and Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. 
The few who do must have thrust it out of their vision, 
unless at night it haunts them. 

The assaulting battalion had lost many men during 
the assault, but their main ordeal came after the first 



io8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

advance, when the German guns belched out a large 
quantity of heavy shells from the direction of Hill 60. 
They raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield 
the position they had gained. But they would not go 
back or crawl away from their dead. 

All through the day the bombardment continued, an- 
swered from our side by fourteen hours of concentrated 
fire, which I watched from our battery positions. In 
spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies through the 
''crumped" trenches, the men held on and consolidated 
their positions. One of the most astounding feats was 
done by the sappers, who put up barbed wire beyond the 
line under a devilish cannonade. 

A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed 
by a shell early in the action, and worked his way back 
to get another. He succeeded in reaching the advanced 
line again, but another shell knocked out his second 
instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch 
with the battalion headquarters by means of messengers, 
and again and again officers and men made their way 
across the zone of fire or died in the attempt. Messages 
reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his front 
trenches had been blown away. 

From other parts of the line reports came in that the 
enemy was preparing a counter-attack. For several 
hours now the colonel of the Durhams could not get into 
touch with his companies, isolated and hidden beneath 
the smoke of the shell-bursts. Flag-wagging and helio- 
graphing were out of the question. He could not tell 
even if a single man remained alive out there beneath all 
those shells. No word came from them now to let him 
know if the enemy were counter-attacking. 

Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make 
his own reconnaissance. The bombardment was still re- 
lentless, and it was only possible to go part of the way in 
an old communication trench. The ground about was 
littered with the dead, still being blown about by high 
explosives. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 109 

The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt 
and with the knowledge that most of the dead here were 
his own. When he told me this adventure his only com- 
ment was the soldier's phrase, "It was not what might 
be called a * healthy' place." He could see no sign of a 
counter-attack, but, straining through the smoke-clouds, 
his eyes could detect no sign of life where his men had 
been holding the captured lines. Were they all dead out 
there ? 

On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion 
would be relieved, and managed to send this order to a 
part of it. It was sent through by various routes, but 
some men who carried it came back with the news that 
it was still impossible to get into touch with the com- 
panies holding the advanced positions above the Menin 
road. 

In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. 
Several of them had been blown as far as ten yards by 
the air-pressure of exploding shells and had been buried 
in the scatter of earth. 

"When at last my men came back — ^those of them who 
had received the order," said the colonel, "I knew the 
price of their achievement — its cost in officers and men." 
He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody sacrifice. 

There were other men still alive and still holding on. 
With some of them were four young ojfficers, who clung 
to their ground all through the next night, before being 
relieved. They were without a drop of water and suf- 
fered the extreme miseries of the battlefield. 

There was no distinction in courage between those four 
men, but the greater share of suffering was borne by one. 
Early in the day he had had his jaw broken by a piece of 
shell, but still led his men. Later in the day he was 
wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his com- 
mand, and he was still leading the survivors of his 
company when he came back on the morning of Tuesday, 
August loth. 

Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. 



no NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who 
had gained possession of the stables above the Menin 
road and now defended their ruins. During the previous 
twenty-four hours he had managed to send through sev- 
eral messages, but they were not to report his exposed 
position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. 
What he said each time was, "Send us more bombs." It 
was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after 
thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away 
from their rubbish heap in the lines of death. 

So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked 
with these men, touched hands with them while the mud 
and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, 
in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through 
such hours without having on their faces more traces of 
their hell, though some of them were still shaking with a 
kind of ague. 



Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer 
sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red 
disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of 
human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decora- 
tive work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near 
Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing 
for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were troop- 
ing into the field with fixed bayonets. 

A friend of mine — an ironical fellow — nudged me, and 
said, "Sunday-school for young Christians!" and made a 
hideous face, very comical. 

It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and "O. C. 
Bayonets" — Col. Ronald Campbell — ^was giving a little 
demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of 
exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, 
which had been sleeping through the centuries, was sud- 
denly awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier- 
boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely 
and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE in 

their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and 
crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they 
lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red 
circles were painted. These inanimate things became 
revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the 
bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from 
the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put 
his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the 
bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the 
sack. 

"That's what I like to see," said an officer. "There's 
a fine fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Ger- 
mans before he's done." 

Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet 
exercise. He curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence 
on the method of attack to pierce liver and lights and 
kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes bulge out of 
their heads, fired them with blood-lust, stoked up hatred 
of Germans — all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and 
a sense of latent power and passion in him. He told 
funny stories — one, famous in the army, called "Where's 
'Arry?" 

It was the story of an attack on German trenches in 
which a crowd of Germans were captured in a dugout. 
The sergeant had been told to blood his men, and during 
the killing he turned round and asked, "Where's 'Arry.? 
. . . 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet." 

'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's 
work, but he was called up and given his man to kill. 
And after that 'Arry was like a man-eating tiger in his 
desire for German blood. 

He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. 
"You may meet a German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten 
children.' . . . Kill him! He might have ten more." 

At those training-schools of British youth (when nature 
was averse to human slaughter until very scientifically 
trained) one might see every form of instruction in every 
kind of weapon and instrument of death — machine-guns. 



112 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on, 
tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth 
of the British Empire graduated in these schools of war, 
and those who lived longest were experts in divers branches 
of technical education. 

Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet mstructi<3n 
and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger 
than the point of a bayonet) to the physical instruction 
of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I 
liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination 
of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowl- 
edge of psychology. When men came down from the 
trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to 
work to build up their vitality again, to get them inter- 
ested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. 
As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized 
them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers 
and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame 
bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. 
Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character 
in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys 
by his description of them. He had names for many of 
his pets — the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he 
taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, 
and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not 
hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by 
games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading up to 
elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He 
challenged the whole army system of discipline imposed 
by authority by a new system of self-discipline based 
upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, 
and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, 
shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly 
into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their 
eyes. 

"It's a pity," he said, "they have to go off again and 
be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed — but 
that's not my fault. It's the fault of war." 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 113 

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered "Willie Wood- 
bine," the fighting parson and soldier's poet, who was 
the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared 
thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. 
Each of them had one thick ear. WiUie Woodbine had 
two. They fought one another with science (as old pro- 
fessionals) and challenged any man in the crowd. Then 
one of them played the violin and drew the soul out of 
soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another 
fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and 
war, and the weakness of men, and the meaning of cour- 
age. He held all those fellows in his hand, put a spell on 
them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave them, 
poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace 
that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches 
again. 

XI 

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the 
New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent 
than in the old days, when battalions held the line for 
long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were 
sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 191 5 it was not 
usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks 
at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, 
where there was more sense of life, though still the chance 
of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as far 
back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and 
the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in 
French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and 
farmstead, villa, and chateau was inhabited by men in 
khaki, who made themselves at home and established 
friendly relations with civiHans there unless they were too 
flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper, or 
too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops 
were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left 
women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in 
a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of 



114 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant 
girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing 
the girls, danced with one another. 

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those 
cottages and barns into which our men crowded will 
retain signs and memories of that British occupation in 
the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to 
the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world 
of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on 
the whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that 
Private John Johnson was a bastard; or that a certain 
battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill 
would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with 
portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but 
vivid and significant. 

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, 
with which he made his needs understood by the elderly 
woman who cooked for his officers' mess. He could say, 
with a fine fluency, "Ou est le blooming couteau?" or 
"Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait, madame." 
It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that "Les 
pommes de terre frites are absolument all right if only 
madame will tenir ses cheveux on." In the courtyards 
of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers and gables 
that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have 
passed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with 
khaki-covered kilts pumped up the water from old wells, 
and whistled "I Know a Lassie" to the girl who brought 
the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while 
Sandy played a "wee bit" on the pipes to the peasant- 
folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations 
existed between the cottagers and their temporary guests 
that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine 
came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversa- 
tion was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old 
lady who had given him her best bedroom at the beginning 
of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like 
a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with his unde- 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 115 

veloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations 
were embarrassing. 

It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty 
Hved but a mile or two away from hideous squalor. 
While men in the lines lived in dugouts and marched down 
communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy weather, 
in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the 
primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, 
turn and turn about, came back to leafy villages and drilled 
in fields all golden with buttercups, and were not too un- 
comfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns. 

There was more than comfort in some of the head- 
quarters where our officers were billeted in French cha- 
teaux. There was a splendor of surroundings which gave 
a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of that 
extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in 
prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and 
went through gilded gates emblazoned with noble coats 
of arms belonging to the days of the Sun King, or farther 
back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals and their 
staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old 
mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by 
noble parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in 
which five centuries of harvests had been stored. From 
one of the archways here one might see in the mind's eye 
Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, 
or even Henri de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all 
their plumes alight in the sun as they mounted their 
horses for a morning's boar-hunt. 

It was surprising at first when a young British officer 
came out and said, "Toppin' morning," or, **Any news 
from the Dardanelles.^" There was something incon- 
gruous about this habitation of French chateaux by 
British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of 
it made me laugh in early days of first impressions, 
when I went through the rooms of one of those old 
historic houses, well within range of the German guns, 



ii6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

with a brigade major. It was the Chateau de Henen- 
court, near Albert. 

"This is the general's bedroom," said the brigade 
major, opening a door which led off a gallery, in which 
many beautiful women of France and many great 
nobles of the old regime looked down from their gilt 
frames. 

The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed 
Mme, du Barry might have stretched her arms and 
yawned, or the beautiful Duchesse de Mazarin might have 
held her morning levee. A British general, with his 
bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little 
strange under that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs 
dancing overhead on the flowered ceiling. His top-boots 
and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze toilet-table. His 
leather belts and field-glasses lay on the polished boards 
beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and 
Diana went a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly 
rose-tinted or darkly paneled other officers had made a 
litter of their bags, haversacks, rubber baths, trench- 
boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down to dinner 
in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France, 
in silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down 
upon their khaki. The owner of the chateau, in whose 
veins flowed the blood of those old aristocrats, was away 
with his regiment, in which he held the rank of corporal. 
His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the es- 
tate, from which all the men-servants except the veterans 
had been mobilized. In her own chateau she kept one 
room for herself, and every morning came in from the 
dairies, where she had been working with her maids, to 
say, with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her 
house: *'Bon jour, messieurs! ^a va bien?" 

She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. 
Poor chateaux of France! German shells came to knock 
down their pointed turrets, to smash through the ceilings 
where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to 
ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 117 

Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of 
brick-dust and twisted iron. 

I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years 
after my first visit there. The enemy's line had come 
closer to it and it was a target for their guns. Our guns 
— heavy and light — ^were firing from the back yard and 
neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had 
already broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and 
torn away great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery 
had his headquarters in the petit salon. His hand 
trembled as he greeted me. 

"I'm not fond of this place," he said. "The whole 
damn thing will come down on my head at any time. I 
think I shall take to the cellars." 

We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the 
way down to the vault. A shell came over the chateau 
and burst in the outhouses. 

"They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago," said the 
colonel. "Made a mess of some heavy gunners." 

There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it 
was not so sinister a place as farther on, where a brother 
of mine sat in a hole directing his battery. . . . The Count- 
ess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with her 
dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads. 



XII 

One of the most curious little schools of courage In- 
habited by British soldiers in early days was the village 
of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, 
who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise 
in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the 
salient it seerned unreal and fantastic, with a touch of 
romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, 
the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our 
trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy 
but a little undergrowth — and the queerest part of it all 
was the sense of safety, the ridiculously false security 



ii8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

with which one could wander about the village and up 
the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one's 
movements were being watched by German eyes and that 
the whole place could be blown off the face of the earth 
. . . but for the convenient fact that the Germans, who 
were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath, 
were under our own observation and at the mercy of our 
own guns. 

That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other 
places, could not go over the parapet of the first-line 
trenches, or even put their heads up for a single second, 
without risking instant death. 

I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and 
one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires 
was some distance away, but after an exchange of com- 
pliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French 
soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the 
British infantry surrounding them — ^it was a cheery 
bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot 
mingling with the odor of burning wood — the lieutenant 
insisted upon leading the way to the top of the hill. 

He made a slight detour to point out a German shell 
which had fallen there without exploding, and made 
laughing comments upon the harmless, futile character 
of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their 
best to kill us, but oh, so feebly! 

Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called 
out, sharply, *'Ne touchez pas!" I would rather have 
touched a sleeping tiger than that conical piece of metal 
with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low to see the 
inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with more 
recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled 
upon it between the men's initials. 

Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our 
trenches, and, standing there, looked down upon the vil- 
lages of Vaux and Curlu, separated by a piece of marshy 
water. In the farthest village were the Germans, and 
in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our own 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 119 

men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway 
across the marsh and a strip of woods half a rifle-shot in 
length. 

Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village 
and ours, were the German trenches and the German 
guns. I looked into the streets of both villages as clearly 
as one may see into Clovelly village from the crest of the 
hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were 
strolling about. One was sitting on the window-sill of 
a cottage, kicking up his heels. 

In the German village of Curlu the roadways were con- 
cealed by the perspective of the houses, with their gables 
and chimney-stacks, so that I could not see any passers- 
by. But at the top of the road, going out of the village 
and standing outside the last house on the road, was a 
solitary figure — a German sentry. 

The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away 
from the village on the hillside. 

"Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist 
their flag for victories. It wagged a good deal during the 
recent Russian fighting. But lately they have not had 
the cheek to put it up." 

This interpreter — the Baron de Rosen — laughed very 
heartily at that naked pole on the hill. 

Then I left him and joined our own men, and went 
down a steep hill into Vaux, well outside our line of 
trenches, and thrust forward as an outpost in the marsh. 
German eyes could see me as I walked. At any moment 
those little houses about me might have been smashed 
into rubbish heaps. But no shells came to disturb the 
waterfowl among the reeds around. 

And so it was that the life in this place was utterly 
abnormal, and while the guns were silent except for long- 
range fire, an old-fashioned mode of war — what the adju- 
tant of this Httle outpost called a "gentlemanly warfare," 
prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few hundred 
yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas 
at night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous 



I20 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

excursion, such as Sir Walter Manny would have liked, 
between thirty or forty men on one side against somewhat 
the same number on the other. 

Our men used to steal out along the causeway which 
crossed the marsh — a pathway about four feet wide, 
broadening out in the middle, so that a little redoubt or 
blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow 
drawbridge, then along the path again until they came 
to the thicket which screened the German village of 
Curlu. 

It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were 
creeping forward from the other direction, in just the 
same way, disguised in party-colored clothes splashed with 
greens and reds and browns to make them invisible be- 
tween the trees, with brown masks over their faces. 
Then suddenly contact was made. 

Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of 
rifles, the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had 
given up the game of invisibility. It was a sharp encoun- 
ter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held the 
village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German 
helmets and other trophies as proofs of victory. Then 
to bed in the village, and a good night's rest, as when 
English knights fought the French, not far from these 
fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war corre- 
spondent. Sir John Froissart. 

All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out 
into the wood, where the outposts stood listening for any 
crack of a twig which might betray a German footstep. 
I was startled when I came suddenly upon two men, 
almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they 
stood, motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through 
the brushwood. If I had followed the path on which 
they stood for just a little way I should have walked 
into the German village. But, on the other hand, I 
should not have walked back again. .. . . 

When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our 
own trenches again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 121 

to that grim little outpost in the marsh. If ail the war 
had been like this it would have been more endurable for 
men who had no need to hide in holes in the earth, nor 
crouch for three months belowground, until an hour or 
two of massacre below a storm of high explosives. In 
the village on the marsh men fought at least against other 
men, and not against invisible powers which belched 
forth death. 

It was part of the French system of "keeping quiet" 
until the turn of big offensives; a good system, to my 
mind, if not carried too far. At Frise, next door to Vaux, 
in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a little too far, 
with relaxed vigilance. 

It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through 
the reeds and enter the French line and exchange souvenirs 
with the sentries. 

"Souvenir!" said one of them one day. "Bullet — you 
know — cartouche. Comprenny?" 

A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, 
sat up with a grin and said, "Mais oui, mon vieux," 
and felt in his pouch for a cartridge, and then in his 
pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between 
his knees. 

"Fini!" he said. "Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade." 

The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that 
little village in the loop of the Somme, and "pinched" 
every man of the French garrison. There was the devil 
to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the 
French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees. 

Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in 
the zone of war, when the battles of the Somme began, 
and were blown off the map. 

XIII 

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armen- 
tieres — a most "unhealthy" place in later years of war — 
a bathing establishment was organized by officers who 



122 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

were as proud of their work as though they had brought 
a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they 
had done that. To any interested visitor, understanding 
the nobility of their work, they exhibited a curious relic. 
It was the Ploly Shirt of Nieppe, which should be treas- 
ured as a memorial in our War Museum — an object- 
lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. 
It was not a saint's shirt, but had been worn by a British 
officer in the trenches, and was like tens of thousands of 
other shirts worn by our officers and men in the first 
winters of the war, neither better nor worse, but a fair 
average specimen. It had been framed in a glass case, 
and revealed, on its linen, the corpses of thousands of lice. 
That vermin swarmed upon the bodies of all our boys 
who went into the trenches and tortured them. After 
three days they were lousy from head to foot. After 
three weeks they were walking menageries. To English 
boys from clean homes, to young officers who had been 
brought up in the religion of the morning tub, this was 
one of the worst horrors of war. They were disgusted 
with themselves. Their own bodies were revolting to 
them. Scores of times I have seen battalions of men 
just out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in 
their shirts for the foul beast. They had a technical 
name for this hunter's job. They called it "chatting." 
They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the water- 
brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men 
in Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and 
there, as at Nieppe, officers with human sympathy or- 
ganized a system by which battalions of men could wash 
their bodies. 

The place in Nieppe had been a jute-factory, and there 
were big tubs in the sheds, and nearby was the water of 
the Lys. Boilers were set going to heat the water. A 
battalion's shirts were put into an oven and the lice were 
baked and killed. It was a splendid thing to see scores 
of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a 
bit of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 123 

of joyous satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid 
heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite dehght, sen- 
suous and spiritual. They were like children. They 
splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put 
their heads underwater and came up puffing and blowing 
like grampuses. Something broke in one's heart to see 
them, those splendid boys whose bodies might soon be 
torn to tatters by chunks of steel. One of them remem- 
bered a bit of Latin he had sung at Stonyhurst : ^' Asperges 
mCy Dominey hyssopo, et mundahor; lavahis mCy et super 
nivem dealbabor." ("Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, 

Lord, and I shall be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and 

1 shall be made whiter than snow.") 

On the other side of the lines the Germans were suffer- 
ing in the same way, lousy also, and they, too, were organ- 
izing bath-houses. After their first retreat I saw a queer 
name on a wooden shed: Entlausunganstalt. I puzzled 
over it a moment, and then understood. It was a new 
word created out of the dirt of modern war — ^"Delousing 
station." 

XIV 

It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death 
was not the only reaper who went about the fields, al- 
though he was busy and did not rest even when the sun 
had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far ridge, 
and left the world in darkness. 

On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, 
silent, under the great dome, staring up at the startling 
splendor of it. The red ball just showed above the far 
line of single trees which were black as charcoal on the 
edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from 
its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame 
against the silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The 
burning colors died out in a few minutes, and the fields 
darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled until they became 
quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest moon. 
Another night had come in this year of war. 



124 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular inter- 
vals the earth trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, 
thunderous shocks. 

"The moon's face looks full of irony to-night," said the 
man by my side. *'It seems to say, 'What fools those 
creatures are down there, spoiling their harvest-time with 
such a mess of blood!'" 

The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish 
nights. I saw the Milky Way clearly tracked across the 
dark desert. The Pleiades and Orion's belt were Hke 
diamonds on black velvet. But among all these worlds 
of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared 
and disappeared. On the road back from a French town 
one night I looked Arras way, and saw what seemed a 
bursting planet. It fell with a scatter of burning pieces. 
Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night was rent with 
stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking it, 
and a moment later a finger of white fire was traced along 
the black edge of the far-off woods, so that the whole sky 
was brightened for a moment and then was blotted out 
by a deeper darkness. . . . Arras was being shelled again, 
as I saw it many times in those long years of war. 

The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was 
rather horrible. Their strange, intense quietude, when 
the guns were not at work, made them dead, as the very 
spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One night, as 
on many others, I walked through one of them with a 
friend. Every house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam 
came through any crack. No footstep, save our own, 
told of life. The darkness was almost palpable. It 
seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet mask. 
My nerves were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny 
silence and invisibility that I started violently at the sound 
of a quiet voice speaking three inches from my ear. 

"Halte! Quivala?" 

It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the 
wall of a house in such a gulf of blackness that not even 
his bayonet was revealed by a glint. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 125 

Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world 
was there, close to the lines of the bronzed cornfields 
splashed with the scarlet of poppies, and the pale yellow 
of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away and away, 
without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met 
the sky. 

I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across 
to a slope of rising ground where there was no ripening 
wheat, and where the grass itself came to a sudden halt, 
as though afraid of something. I knew the reason of 
this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for 
miles each way. Those were the parapets of German 
trenches, and in the ditches below them were earth-men, 
armed with deadly weapons, staring out across the beauty 
of France and wondering, perhaps, why they should be 
there to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in 
their range of vision, with an idle thought as to whether 
it were worth their while to let a bullet loose and end my 
walk. They could have done so easily, but did not 
bother. No shot or shell came to break through the 
hum of bees or to crash through the sigh of the wind, 
which was bending all the ears of corn to listen to the 
murmurous insect-life in these fields of France. 

Close to me was a group of peasants — 3. study for a 
painter like Millet. One of them shouted out to me, 
"Voila les Boches!" waving his arm to left and right, and 
then shaking a clenched fist at them. 

A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an 
open bodice munched an apple, like Audrey in "As You 
Like It," and between her bites told me that she had had 
a brother killed in the war, and that she had been nearly 
killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting 
all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed 
to great holes in the field), and described the coming of 
the Germans into her village over there, when she had lied 
to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of French soldiers 
and had given one of those fat Germans a blow on the 



126 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

face when he had tried to make love to her in her father's 
barn. Her mother had been raped. 

In further fields out of view of the German trenches, 
but well within shell-range, the harvesting was being done 
by French soldiers. One of them was driving the reaping- 
machine and looked like a gunner on his limber, with his 
kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of his 
comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the 
edge of the wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased 
their work to drink out of a leather wine-bottle which had 
been replenished from a hand-cart. It was a pretty scene 
if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those 
harvesters in uniform. 

The same thought was in the mind of a British 
officer. 

"A beautiful country, this," he said. "It's a pity to 
cut it up with trenches and barbed wire." 

Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but 
a furlong or two away from that Invisible Man who was 
wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. 
Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's 
souls, not shirking the next ordeal. 

It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, 
that one found one's way to many of the trenches that 
marked the boundary-lines of the year's harvesting, and 
in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of our batteries, 
answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn 
howls of murder across the heads of peasant women who 
were gleaning, with bent backs. 

In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under 
showers of shrapnel, but the long avenues between the 
trenches were cool and pleasant in the heat of the day. 
It was one of the elementary schools where many of our 
soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their 
training in camps behind the lines. Here one might 
sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but for the fact that 
country wenches were not allowed in the dugouts and 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 127 

trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the 
intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes. 

The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pur- 
suit of killing time and life (with luck), and sniping was 
hot on both sides, so that the wood resounded with sharp 
reports as though hard filbert nuts were being cracked 
by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men 
was hit by a sniper, and his body was carried off for 
burial as I went toward the first line of trenches, hoping 
that my shadow would not fall across a German periscope. 
The sight of that dead body passing chilled one a little. 
There were many graves in the bosky arbors — eighteen 
under one mound — but some of those who had fallen six 
months before still lay where the gleaners could not 
reach them. 

I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood 
at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature 
had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and 
shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many bar- 
ren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge 
of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of 
Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but 
that of broken shells and shrapnel bullets and a litter of 
limbs. 

XV 

For some time the War Office would not allow military 
bands at the front, not understanding that music was like 
water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals 
realized the utter need of entertainment among men 
dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged 
"variety" shows, organized by young officers who had 
been amateur actors before the war, who searched around 
for likely talent. There was plenty of it in the New 
Army, including professional "funny men," trick cyclists, 
conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the summer of 
'15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertain- 
ments: "The FolHes," "The Bow Bells," "The Jocks," 



128 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

*n^he Pip-Squeaks," "The Whizz-Bangs," "The Dia- 
monds," "The Brass Hats," "The Verey Lights," and 
many others with fancy names. 

I remember going to one of the first of them in the vil- 
lage of Acheux, a few miles from the German lines. It 
was held in an old sugar-factory, and I shall long re- 
member the impressions of the place, with seven or 
eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, 
broken, barnlike building, where strange bits of ma- 
chinery looked through the darkness, and where through 
gashes in the walls stars twinkled. 

There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpau- 
lins and damp khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent 
in one's nostrils, and when the curtain went up on a well- 
fitted stage and "The FolHes" began their performance, 
the squalor of the place did not matter. What mattered 
was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the 
piano, and the outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired 
soldier with a red nose, who described how he had run 
away from Mons "with the rest of you," and the Hght- 
heartedness of a performance which could have gone 
straight to a London music-hall and brought down the 
house with jokes and songs made up in dugouts and front- 
line trenches. 

At first the audience sat silent, with glazed eyes. It 
was difficult to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the 
trenches was still on them. They stank of the trenches, 
and the stench was in their souls. Presently they began 
to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes. They 
laughed ! . . . Later, from this audience of soldiers there 
were yells of laughter, though the effect of shells arriving 
at unexpected moments, in untoward circumstances, was 
a favorite theme of the jesters. Many of the men were 
going into the trenches that night again, and there would 
be no fun in the noise of the shells, but they went more 
gaily and with stronger hearts, I am sure, because of the 
laughter which had roared through the old sugar- 
factory. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 129 

A night or two later I went to another concert and heard 
the same gaiety of men who had been through a year of 
war. It was in an open field, under a velvety sky studded 
with innumerable stars. Nearly a thousand soldiers 
trooped through the gates and massed before the little 
canvas theater. In front a small crowd of Flemish chil- 
dren squatted on the grass, not understanding a word of 
the jokes, but laughing in shrill delight at the antics of 
soldier-Pierrots. The corner-man was a funny fellow, 
and his by-play with a stout Flemish woman round the 
flap of the canvas screen, to whom he made amorous 
advances while his comrades were singing sentimental 
ballads, was truly comic. The hit of the evening was 
when an Australian behind the stage gave an unexpected 
imitation of a laughing-jackass. 

There was something indescribably weird and wild and 
grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural 
mirth. An Australian by my side said: "Well done! 
Exactly right!" and the Flemish children shrieked with 
joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. 
Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were 
given by the soldiers, who had great emotion and broke 
down sometimes in the middle of a verse. There were 
funny men dressed in the Widow Twankey style, or in 
burlesque uniforms, who were greeted with yells of laugh- 
ter by their comrades. An Australian giant played some 
clever card tricks, and another Australian recited Kip- 
ling's "Gunga Din" with splendid fire. And between 
every "turn" the soldiers in the field roared out a chorus: 

"Jolly good song, 
Jolly well sung. 

If you can think of a better you're welcome to try. 
But don't forget the singer is dry; 
Give the poor beggar some beer!" 

A touring company of mouth-organ musicians was hav- 
ing a great success in the war zone. But, apart from all 
those organized methods of mirth, there was a funny man 



I30 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

m every billet who played the part of court jester, and 
clowned it whatever the state of the weather or the risks 
of war. The British soldier would have his game of 
"house" or "crown and anchor" even on the edge of the 
shell-storm, and his little bit of sport wherever there was 
room to stretch his legs. It was a jesting army (though 
some of its jokes were very grim), and those who saw, as 
I did, the daily tragedy of war, never ceasing, always 
adding to the sum of human suffering, were not likely to 
discourage that sense of humor. 

A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and 
tissue-paper and penny whistles was given by the 
Guards in the front-line trenches near Loos. They played 
old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion and 
technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. 
The Germans crowded into their front line — not far away 
— and applauded each number. Presently, in good Eng- 
lish, a German voice shouted across: 

"Play 'Annie Laurie' and I will sing it." 

The Guards played "Annie Laurie," and a German 
officer stood up on the parapet — the evening sun was red 
behind him — and sang the old song admirably, with great 
tenderness. There was applause on both sides. 

"Let's have another concert to-morrow!" shouted the 
Germans. 

But there was a different kind of concert next day, and 
the music was played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, 
rifle-grenades, and other instruments of death in posses- 
sion of the Guards. There were cries of agony and terror 
from the German trenches, and young officers of the 
Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud 
laughter. 

XVI 

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of 
gruesome things, of war's brutality — I with the rest of 
them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 131 

ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life 
and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all 
our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It 
played the "hat trick" with the gentility of modern man- 
ners. Men who had been brought up to Christian vir- 
tues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' 
knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, 
music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of 
half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their 
choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found them- 
selves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was 
abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful 
episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized 
ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was 
the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, espe- 
cially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded 
salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. 

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick 
which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They 
had been taught to believe that the whole object of life 
was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, 
in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, 
cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival 
by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, 
all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. 

Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to 
hard ground. The contrast between That and This was 
devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, 
like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, 
creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slip- 
ping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, 
with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time 
humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all 
that dignity and elegance despoiled. 

So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military 
chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, '(and Christian service) 
described how an English sergeant stood round the trav- 
erse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Ger- 



132 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

mans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull 
after another with a steel-studded bludgeon — a weapon 
which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the 
model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures of a 
fairy-tale. 

So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister 
(a brilliant fellow in the Oxford "Union") whose pleasure 
it was to creep out o' nights into No Man's Land and lie 
doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy's barbed wire, 
until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German 
soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English 
barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been 
one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch 
on his rifle — three notches one night — to check the num- 
ber of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in 
his dugout with a hearty appetite. 

In one section of trenches the men made a habit of 
betting upon those who would be wounded first. It had 
all the uncertainty of the roulette-table. . . . One day, 
when the German gunners were putting over a special 
dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to 
inquire about a "new chum" who had come up with the 
drafts. 

"Is Private Smith all right?" he asked. 

"Yes, Sergeant, he's all right," answered the men 
crouching in the dark hole. 

"Private Smith isn't wounded yet.^" asked the ser- 
geant again, five minutes later. 

"No, Sergeant." 

Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well- 
being. 

"That sergeant seems a very kind man," said the boy. 
"Seems to love me like a father!" 

A yell of laughter answered him. 

"You poor, bleeding fool!" said one of his comrades. 
"He's drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you'd 
been hit." 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 133 

In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and 
bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags 
with the soil that was sent back down a Hne of men con- 
ceaHng their work from German eyes waiting for any new 
activity in our ditches. 

*'Bit of Bill," said the leading man, putting in a leg. 

** Another bit of Bill," he said, unearthing a hand. 

"Bill's ugly mug," he said at a later stage in the opera- 
tions, when a head was found. 

As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches 
seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. 
Chaplains treasured it. 

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney 
soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, cry- 
ing: "Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!" 

"Not so much of your *Mercy, Kamerad,'" said the 
cockney. "'And us over your bloody ticker!" 

It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment. 

One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the 
early days of the war. 

"Where's your prisoner?" asked an Intelligence officer 
waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches 
under escort of an honest corporal. 

"I lost him on the way, sir," said the corporal. 

"Lost him?" 

The corporal was embarrassed. 

"Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was 

like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. 

Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I'd been thinking 

of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned 

as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies 

at 'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. 

Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago 

and he'd never see her again. When he started cryin' 

I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer, sir. 

So I killed the poor blighter." 
10 



134 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the 
waist in water sometimes, lying in sHmy dugouts, Hce- 
eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under 
harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between Hfe and 
death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for 
laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and 
in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the pro- 
tective armor of men's souls. They knew that if they 
did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would 
stand between them and fear. 

"You know, sir," said a sergeant-major, one day, when 
I walked with him down a communication trench so 
waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, "it 
doesn't do to take this war seriously." 

And, as, though in answer to him, a soldier without 
breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked 
at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a 
glint of comedy in his eyes: 

"That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very 
active, sir. It's a pity it don't come down these blinkin' 
trenches and do a bit of work!" 

"Having a clean-up, my man?'* said a brigadier to a 
soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen 
mug. 

"Yes, sir," said the man, "and I wish I was a blasted 
canary." 

One of the most remarkable battles on the front was 
fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two 
English members of Parliament. It was not a very big 
battle, but most dramatic while it lasted. The colonel 
(who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a telephone 
message to his dugout telling him that two politicians 
were about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking 
him to show them something interesting. 

"Interesting?" said the colonel. "Do they think this 
war is a peep-show for politicians? Do they want me to 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 135 

arrange a massacre to make a London holiday?" Then 
his voice changed and he laughed. "Show them some- 
thing interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do 
that." 

He did. When the two M. P.'s arrived, apparently at 
the front-line trenches, they were informed by the colonel 
that, much to his regret, for their sake, the enemy was 
just attacking, and that his men were defending their 
position desperately. 

*'We hope for the best," he said, "and I think there is 
just a chance that you will escape with your lives if you 
stay here quite quietly." 

"Great God!" said one of the M. P.*s, and the other 
was silent, but pale. 

Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The 
Worcesters were standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle- 
grenades and throwing bombs with terrific energy. Every 
now and then a man fell, and the stretcher-bearers pounced 
on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried him away 
to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, "We 
won't go home till morning," in a most heroic way. . . . 
The battle lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which 
time the colonel announced to his visitors: 

"The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have 
nothing more to fear." 

One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. "The 
valor of your men was marvelous," he said, "What im- 
pressed me most was the cheerfulness of the wounded. 
They were actually grinning as they came down on the 
stretchers." 

The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of 
coughing, "Funny devils!" he said. "They are so glad 
to be going home." 

The members of Parliament went away enormously 
impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly 
as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle 
— not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches 
two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward. 



136 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

XVII 

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town 
of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous 
nightbirds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large 
convent. There were no nuns there, but generally some 
hundreds of young officers and men from many different 
battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the 
direction of General Baker-Carr, who was the master 
machine-gunner of the British army (at a time when we 
were very weak in those weapons compared with the 
enemy's strength) and a cheery, vital man. 

"This war has produced two great dugouts," said Lord 
Kitchener on a visit to the convent. " Me and Baker-Carr." 

It was the boys who interested me more than the 
machines. (I was never much interested in the machinery 
of war.) They came down from the trenches to this 
school with a sense of escape from prison, and for the ten 
days of their course they were like *' freshers" at Oxford 
and made the most of their minutes, organizing concerts 
and other entertainments in the evenings after their in- 
itiation into the mysteries of Vickers and Lewis. I was 
invited to dinner there one night, and sat between two 
young cavalry officers on long benches crowded with sub- 
alterns of many regiments. It was a merry meal and a 
good one — to this day I remember a potato pie, gloriously 
baked, and afterward, as it was the last night of the course, 
all the officers went wild and indulged in a '*rag" of the 
public-school kind. They straddled across the benches 
and barged at each other in single tourneys and jousts, 
riding their hobby-horses with violent rearings and 
plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt 
and with yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery 
crashed upon the polished boards. One boy danced the 
Highland fling on the tables, others were waltzing down 
the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory, 
and hunting-men cried the *^View halloo!" and shouted 
"Yoicks! yoicks!" . . . General Baker-Carr was a human 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 137 

soul, and kept to his own room that night and let disci- 
pline go hang. . . . 

When the battles of the Somme began it was those 
young officers who led their machine-gun sections into 
the woods of death — Belville Wood, Mametz Wood, High 
Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held 
the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still 
alive on March 21, 1918, when they were surrounded by 
a sea of Germans and fought until the last, in isolated 
redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin. Two of them 
are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that 
night, and who escaped many close calls of death before 
the armistice. Of the others who charged one another 
with wooden benches, their laughter ringing out, some 
were blown to bits, and some were buried alive, and some 
were blinded and gassed, and some went "missing" for 
evermore. 

XVIII 

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary 
lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the 
mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of 
men who were in exile from the normal interests of life 
and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, 
abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral 
code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed 
no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no 
probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was 
bad enough in the trenches, where men looked across the 
parapet to the same corner of hell day by day, to the same 
dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, 
to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the 
blasted tree sliced by shell-fire, the upturned railway- 
truck of which only the metal remained, the distant 
fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-line, the broken 
spire of a church vv'hich could be seen in the round O of 
the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In 
"quiet" sections of the line the only variation to the 



138 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

routine was the number of casualties day by day, by 
casual shell-fire or snipers' bullets, and that became part 
of the boredom. **What casualties?" asked the adjutant 
in his dugout. 

"Two killed, three wounded, sir." 

"Very well. . . . You can go." 

A salute in the doorway of the dugout, a groan from the 
adjutant lighting another cigarette, leaning with his elbow 
on the deal table, staring at the guttering of the candle 
by his side, at the pile of forms in front of him, at the 
glint of light on the steel helmet hanging by its strap on 
a nail near the shelf where he kept his safety-razor, flash- 
lamp, love-letters (in an old cigar-box), soap, whisky- 
bottle (almost empty now), and an unread novel. 

"Hell! . . .What a life!" 

But there was always work to do, and odd incidents, 
and frights, and responsibilities. 

It was worse — ^this boredom — for men behind the lines; 
in lorry columns which went from rail-head to dump every 
damned morning, and back again by the middle of the 
morning, and then nothing else to do for all the day, in 
a cramped little billet with a sulky woman in the kitchen, 
and squealing children in the yard, and a stench of manure 
through the small window. A dull life for an actor who 
had toured in England and America (like one I met dazed 
and stupefied by years of boredom — paying too much for 
safety), or for a barrister who had many briefs before the 
war and now found his memory going, though a young 
man, because of the narrow limits of his life between one 
Flemish village and another, which was the length of his 
lorry column and of his adventure of war. Nothing ever 
happened to break the monotony — not even shell-fire. 
So it was also in small towns like Hesdin, St. -Pol, Bruay, 
Lillers — a hundred others where officers stayed for years 
in charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor 
battalions, administration offices, claim commissions, 
graves' registration, agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of 
jobs connected with that life of war, but not exciting. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 139 

'Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were 
tempted to take to drink, to look around for unattached 
women, to gamble at cards with any poor devil like them- 
selves. Those were most bored who were most virtuous. 
For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no pos- 
sibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless 
they were mystics, as some became, who found God good 
company and needed no other help. They had rare luck, 
those fellows with an astounding faith which rose above 
the irony and the brutality of that business being done in 
the trenches, but there were few of them. 

Even with hours of leisure, men who had been "book- 
ish" could not read. That was a common phenomenon. I 
could read hardly at all, for years, and thousands were 
like me. The most "exciting" novel was dull stuff up 
against that world convulsion. What did the romance 
of love mean, the little tortures of one man's heart, or 
one woman's, troubled in their mating, when thousands 
of men were being killed and vast populations were in 
agony? History — ^Greek or Roman or medieval — ^what 
was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world his- 
tory was being made with a rush.? Poetry — poor poets 
with their love of beauty! What did beauty matter, now 
that it lay dead in the soul of the world, under the filth 
of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and the 
law of the apelike man.? No — we could not read; but 
talked and talked about the old philosophy of life, and 
the structure of society, and Democracy and Liberty 
and Patriotism and Internationalism, and Brotherhood 
of Men, and God, and Christian ethics; and then talked 
no more, because all words were futile, and just brooded 
and brooded, after searching the daily paper (two days 
old) for any kind of hope and Hght, not finding either. 

XIX 

At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and 
men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our 



HO NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the 
cheerful shout of "Now we sha'n't be long!" before they 
fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons 
to the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. 
The New Army boys who followed them were desperate 
to get out to "the great adventure." They cursed the 
length of their training in Enghsh camps. "We sha'n't 
get out till it's too late!" they said. Too late, O God! 
Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches 
and came up against German strength they kept a queer 
faith, for a time, that "something" would happen to bring 
peace as quickly as war had come. Peace was always 
coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-ojB&cers, 
as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong opti- 
mism, not based on any kind of reason; but gradually it 
died out, and in its place came the awful conviction which 
settled upon the hearts of the fighting-men, that this war 
would go on forever, that it was their doom always to 
live in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of 
escape was by a "Blighty" wound or by death. 

A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent 
boys by pretending to have special knowledge of inside 
politics. 

"I have it on good authority," he said, "that peace is 
near at hand. There have been negotiations in Paris — " 

Or: 

"I don't mind telling you lads that if you get through 
the next scrap you will have peace before you know where 
you are." 

They were not believing, now. He had played that 
game too often. 

"Old stuff, padre!" they said. 

That particular crowd did not get through the next 
scrap. But the padre's authority was good. They had 
peace long before the armistice. 

It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who 
were lucky enough to get a "cushie" wound, and so went 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 141 

on and on, or who were patched up again quickly after 
one, two, or three wounds, and came back again. It was 
a boy Hke that who revealed his bitterness to me one day 
as we stood together in the saHent. 

"It's the length of the war," he said, "which does one 
down. At first it seemed like a big adventure, and the 
excitement of it, horrible though it was, kept one going. 
Even the first time I went over the top wasn't so bad as 
I thought it would be. I was dazed and drunk with all 
sorts of emotions, including fear, that were worse before 
going over. I had what we call 'the needle.' They all 
have it. Afterward one didn't know what one was doing 
— even the killing part of the business — until one reached 
the objective and lay down and had time to think and 
to count the dead about. . . . Now the excitement has 
gone out of it, and the war looks as though it would go 
on forever. At first we all" searched the papers for some 
hope that the end was near. We don't do that now. 
We know that whenever the war ends, this year or next, 
this little crowd will be mostly wiped out. Bound to be. 
And why are we going to die? That's what all of us 
want to know. What's it all about? Oh yes, I know 
the usual answers: *In defense of liberty,' 'To save the 
Empire.' But we've all lost our liberty. We're slaves 
under shell-fire. And as for the Empire — I don't give a 
curse for it. I'm thinking only of my little home at 
Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun? I've no quarrel 
with the poor blighters over there by Hooge. They are 
in the same bloody mess as we are. They hate it just as 
much. We're all under a spell together, which some devils 
have put on us. I wonder if there's a God anywhere." 

This sense of being under a black spell I found ex- 
pressed by other men, and by German prisoners who used 
the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles 
of the Somme, who said, in good English: "This war was 
not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a 
spell." This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal 



142 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

character of modern warfare, in which gun-fire is at so 
long a range that shell-fire has the quality of natural and 
elemental powers of death — like thunderbolts — and men 
killed twenty miles behind the hues while walking over 
sunny fields or in busy villages had no thought of a human 
enemy desiring their individual death. 

God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds 
of simple lads desiring life and not death. They could 
not reconcile the Christian precepts of the chaplain with 
the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles of the 
battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the 
fields of France and Flanders seemed to them — to many of 
them, I know — a certain proof that God did not exist, 
or if He did exist was not, as they were told, a God of 
Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of men. That 
at least was the thought expressed to me by some London 
lads who argued the matter with me one day, and that 
was the thought which our army chaplains had to meet 
from men who would not be put off by conventional 
words. It was not good enough to tell them that the 
Germans were guilty of all this crime and that unless the 
Germans were beaten the world would lose its liberty 
and life. "Yes, we know all that," they said, "but why 
did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen who ar- 
ranged the world by force, or the clergy who christened 
British warships.'' And how is it that both sides pray 
to the same God for victory? There must be something 
wrong somewhere." 

It was not often men talked like that, except to some 
chaplain who was a human, comradely soul, some Catholic 
"padre" who devoted himself fearlessly to their bodily 
and spiritual needs, risking his life with them, or to some 
Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa under 
shell-fire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of 
"Keep your hearts up, my lads, and your heads down." 

Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions 
in the place of faith. "It's no good worrying," they said. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 143 

**If your name is written on a German shell you can't 
escape it, and if it isn't written, nothing can touch you." 

Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and 
superstitions which amused them and helped them. 
"Have the Huns found you out yet.^"' I asked some gun- 
ner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. 
"Not yet," said one of them, and then they all left the 
table at which we were at lunch and, making a rush for 
some oak beams, embraced them ardently. They were 
touching wood. 

"Take this with you," said an Irish officer on a night 
I went to Ypres. "It will help you as it has helped me. 
It's my lucky charm." He gave me a little bit of coal 
which he carried in his tunic, and he was so earnest about 
it that I took it without a smile — and felt the safer for it. 

Once in a while the men went home on seven days' 
leave, or four, and then came back again, gloomily, with 
a curious kind of hatred of England because the people 
there seemed so callous to their suffering, so utterly with- 
out understanding, so "damned cheerful." They hated 
the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old 
men who said, "If I had six sons I would sacrifice them 
all in the Sacred Cause." They desired that profiteers 
should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the 
Germans to send Zeppelins to England — to make the 
people know what war meant. Their leave had done 
them no good at all. 

From a week-end at home I stood among a number of 
soldiers who were going back to the front, after one of 
those leaves. The boat warped away from the pier, the 
M. T. O. and a small group of officers, detectives, and 
Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and 
the "revenants" on deck stared back at the cliffs of Eng- 
land across a widening strip of sea. 

"Back to the bloody old trenches," said a voice, and 
the words ended with a hard laugh. They were spoken 
by a young officer of the Guards, whom I had seen on the 



t44 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty woman, 
who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and 
said, "Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!" After- 
ward he had sat in the corner of his carriage, staring with 
a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but seeing nothing 
of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A 
few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb — an acci- 
dent of war.) 

A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a 
melancholy way, **You know who I am, don't you, sir?" 

I hadn't the least idea who he was — this little ginger- 
haired soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I 
saw that he wore the claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. 
on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name, and said the 
papers had **done him proud," and that they had made a 
lot of him at home — presentations, receptions, speeches, 
Lord Mayor's addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. 
He was one of our Heroes, though one couldn't tell it by 
the look of him. 

*'Now I'm going back to the trenches," he said, gloom- 
ily. *'Same old business and one of the crowd again." 
He was suffering from the reaction of popular idolatry. 
He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him now 
or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff- 
officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and 
army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver 
fish with shining gills and a humming song in its stomach. 

France . . . and the beginning of what the little V. C. 
had called "the same old business." There was the long 
fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate 
business of all those young men in khaki whom I had 
seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shoulder- 
ing their way down the Strand. 

Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which 
goes down to the deck of the hospital-ship, on which an 
officer was ticking off each wounded body after a glance 
at the label tied to the man's tunic. Several young 
officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers, and 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 145 

one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down 
upon him. The same old business and the same old 
pluck. 

I motored down the long, straight roads of France 
eastward, toward that network of lines which are the end 
of all journeys after a few days' leave, home and back 
again. The same old sights and sounds and smells 
which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck 
to live through the war, will haunt them for the rest of 
life, and speak of Flanders. 

The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week 
or two before, there had been fields of high, bronzed corn 
there were now long stretches of stubbled ground waiting 
for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had been piled into 
stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to the 
red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose 
sails were motionless because no breath of air stirred on 
this September afternoon. The smell of Flemish villages 
— a mingled odor of sun-baked thatch and bakeries and 
manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up 
through the centuries — ^was overborne by a new and more 
pungent aroma which crept over the fields with the even- 
ing haze. 

It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption 
and death. It was the first breath of autumn, and I 
shivered a little. Must there be another winter of war? 
The old misery of darkness and dampness was creeping 
up through the splendor of September sunshine. 

Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their 
nostrils were keen, to mind its menace — those soldiers 
who came marching down the road, with tanned faces. 
How fine they looked, and how hard, and how cheerful, 
with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man 
would "grouse" at the duration of the war and swear 
that he was *'fed up" with it. Homesickness assailed 
them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The hammering 
of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their tem- 
per and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had 



146 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw 
again the shell-shock cases. 

But again I heard their laughter and an old song 
whistled vilely out of tunej but cheerful to the tramp of 
their feet. They were going back to the trenches after 
a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of whizz- 
bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet 
clay and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who 
once belonged to a civilization which had passed. And 
they went whistling on their way, because it was the very 
best thing to do. 

One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back 
into the "feel" of the war zone. There were the five old 
windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, 
and the estaminets by which one found one's way down 
country lanes — "The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost 
Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields" — and the first 
smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of 
constant shell-fire. Ugh! 

So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There 
were some more cottages down in the village, where we 
had tea a month before. And in the market-place of a 
sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken and 
some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was 
new since we last passed this way. 

London was only seven hours away, but the hours on 
leave there seemed a year ago already. The men who 
had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed 
sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, 
after all, this business of war was something more real 
than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral 
cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long 
spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came 
back to them and became the normal instead of the 
abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of 
war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench 
from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident 
and school the more enduring experience. 



THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE 147 

There were no new impressions, only the repetition of 
old impressions. So I found when I heard the guns again 
and watched the shells bursting about Ypres and over 
Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower. 

Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum 
of their engines was loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. 
Our shrapnel burst about them, but did not touch their 
wings. All around there was the slamming of great guns, 
and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-hole, 
thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of 
all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled 
me for miles. No amount of meditation would screw a 
new meaning out oFit all. It was just the commonplace 
of life out here. 

The routine of it went on. The officer who came back 
from home stepped into his old place, and after the first 
greeting of, "Hullo, old man! Had a good time?'* found 
his old job waiting for him. So there was a new briga- 
dier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove! 

Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, 
and it was rotten bad luck that the sergeant-major should 
have been among them. A real good fellow. However, 
there's that court martial for this afternoon, and, by the 
by, when is that timber coming up? Can't build the 
new dugout if there's no decent wood to be got by stealing 
or otherwise. You heard how the men got strafed in their 
billets the other day? Dirty work! 

The man who had come back went into the trenches 
and had a word or two with the N. C. O.'s, Then he 
went into his own dugout. The mice had been getting 
at his papers. Oh yes, that's where he left his pipe! It 
was lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped 
it before going on leave. The clay walls were a bit wet 
after the rains. He stood with a chilled feeling in this 
little hole of his, staring at every familiar thing in it. 

Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He 
said good-by to her at Victoria Station. How long ago? 
Surely more than seven hours, or seven years. . . . Out- 



148 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

side there were the old noises. The guns were at it again. 
That was a trench-mortar. The enemy's eight-inch how- 
itzers were plugging away. What a beastly row that 
machine-gun was making! Playing on the same old spot. 
Why couldn't they leave it alone, the asses ? . . . Anyhow, 
there was no doubt about it — he had come back again. 
Back to the trenches and the same old business. 

There was a mine to be blown up that night and it 
would make a pretty mess in the enemy's lines. The 
colonel was very cheerful about it, and explained that a 
good deal of sapping had been done. "We've got the 
bulge on 'em," he said, referring to the enemy's failures 
in this class of work. In the mess all the ojfficers were 
carrying on as usual, making the same old jokes. 

The man who had come back got back also the spirit 
of the thing with astonishing rapidity. That other life 
of his, away there in old London, was shut up in the cup- 
board of his heart. 

So it went on and on until the torture of its boredom 
was broken by the crash of big battles, and the New 
Armies, which had been learning lessons in the School of 
Courage, went forward to the great test, and passed, with 
honor. 



Part Three 

THE NATURE 
OF A BATTLE 



HOW THE NEW ARMY WENT TO LOOS 



IN September of 191 5 the Commander-in-Chief and 
his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in 
conjunction with the French, which had ambitious 
objects. These have never been stated because they were 
not gained (and it was the habit of our High Command 
to conceal its objectives and minimize their importance 
if their hopes were unfulfilled), but beyond doubt the 
purpose of the battle was to gain possession of Lens and 
its coal-fields, and by striking through Hulluch and 
Haisnes to menace the German occupation of Lille. On 
the British front the key of the enemy's position was 
Hill 70, to the north of Lens, beyond the village of Loos, 
and the capture of that village and that hill was the first 
essential of success. 

The assault on these positions was to be made by two 
New Army divisions of the 4th Corps: the 47th (Lon- 
don) Division, and the 15th (Scottish) Division. They 
were to be supported by the nth Corps, consisting of the 
Guards and two new and untried divisions, the 21st and 
the 24th. The Cavalry Corps (less the 3d Cavalry 
Division under General Fanshawe) was in reserve far back 
at St.-Pol and Pernes; and the Indian Cavalry Corps 
under General Remington was at Doullens; "to be in 
readiness," wrote Sir John French, "to co-operate with 
the French cavalry in exploiting any success which might 
be attained by the French and British forces." . . . Oh, 
wonderful optimism! In that Black Country of France, 
scattered with mining villages in which every house was 
a machine-gun fort, with slag heaps and pit-heads which 



IS2 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

were formidable redoubts, with trenches and barbed 
wire and brick-stacks, and quarries, organized for de- 
fense in siege-warfare, cavalry might as well have ridden 
through hell with hope of "exploiting" success. . . . 
"Plans for effective co-operation were fully arranged be- 
tween the cavalry commanders of both armies," wrote 
our Commander-in-Chief in his despatch. I can imagine 
those gallant old gentlemen devising their plans, with 
grave courtesy, over large maps, and A. D. C.'s clicking 
heels in attendance, and an air of immense wisdom and 
most cheerful assurance governing the proceedings in the 
salon of a French chateau. . . . The 3d Cavalry Division, 
less one brigade, was assigned to the First Army as a 
reserve, and moved into the area of the 4th Corps on the 
2ist and 22d of September. 



II 

The movements of troops and the preparations for big 
events revealed to every British soldier in France the 
"secret" of the coming battle. Casualty clearing-sta- 
tions were ordered to make ready for big numbers of 
wounded. That was always one of the first signs of ap- 
proaching massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being 
brought up to the rail-heads and stacked in the "dumps." 
They were the first-fruit of the speeding up of munition- 
factories at home after the public outcry against shell 
shortage and the lack of high explosives. Well, at last 
the guns would not be starved. There was enough high- 
explosive force available to blast the German trenches off 
the map. So it seemed to our innocence — though years 
afterward we knew that no bombardment would destroy 
all earthworks such as Germans made, and that always 
machine-guns would slash our infantry advancing over 
the chaos of mangled ground. 

Behind our lines in France, in scores of villages where 
our men were quartered, there was a sense of impending 
fate. Soldiers of the New Army knew that in a little 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 153 

while the lessons they had learned in the School of Cour- 
age would be put to a more frightful test than that of 
holding trenches in stationary warfare. Their boredom, 
the intolerable monotony of that routine life, would be 
broken by more sensational drama, and some of them 
were glad of that, and said: *' Let's get on with it. Any- 
thing rather than that deadly stagnation." And others, 
who guessed they were chosen for the coming battle, and 
had a clear vision of what kind of things would happen 
(they knew something about the losses at Neuve Chapelle 
and Festubert), became more thoughtful than usual, 
deeply introspective, wondering how many days of life 
they had left to them. 

Life was good out of the line in that September of *I5. 
The land of France was full of beauty, with bronzed corn- 
stooks in the fields, and scarlet poppies in the grass, and 
a golden sunlight on old barns and on little white churches 
and in orchards heavy with fruit. It was good to go into 
the garden of a French chateau and pluck a rose and 
smell its sweetness, and think back to England, where 
other roses were blooming. England! . . . And in a few 
days — who could say? — perhaps eternal sleep somewhere 
near Lens. 

Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of 
the little house where I lived at that time with other on- 
lookers. It was an untidy garden, with a stretch of grass- 
plot too rough to be called a lawn, but with pleasant 
shade under the trees, and a potager with raspberries 
and currants on the bushes, and flower-beds where red 
and white roses dropped their petals. 

Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, 
came to gossip with us, and read the papers, and drink 
a little whisky in the evenings, and pick the raspberries. 
They were not professional soldiers. One of them had 
been a stock-broker, the other "something in the city.'* 
They disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred 
and contempt. They hated war with a ferocity which 
was only a little ^'camouflaged" by the irony and the 



154 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

brutality of their anecdotes of war's little comedies. They 
took a grim delight in the humor of corpses, lice, bayonet- 
work, and the sniping of fair-haired German boys. They 
laughed, almost excessively, at these attributes of warfare, 
and one of them used to remark, after some such anec- 
dote, "And once I was a Httle gentleman!" 

He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his 
heart — I saw him touch the petals of living roses with a 
caress in his finger-tips — and with a spiritual revolt against 
the beastliness of this new job of his, although he was a 
strong, hard fellow, without weakness of sentiment. His 
close comrade was of more delicate fiber, a gentle soul, 
not made for soldiering at all, but rather for domestic 
life, with children about him, and books. As the even- 
ings passed in this French village, drawing him closer to 
Loos by the flight of time, I saw the trouble in his eyes 
which he tried to hide by smiling and by courteous con- 
versation. He was being drawn closer to Loos and farther 
away from the wife who knew nothing of what that name 
meant to her and to him. 

Other officers of the Guards came into the garden — 
Grenadiers. There were two young brothers of an old 
family who had always sent their sons to war. They 
looked absurdly young when they took off their tunics 
and played a game of cricket, with a club for a bat, and 
a tennis-ball. They were just schoolboys, but with the 
gravity of men who knew that life is short. I watched 
their young athletic figures, so clean-limbed, so full of 
grace, as they threw the ball, and had a vision of them 
lying mangled. 

An Indian prince came into the garden. It was "Ran- 
jitsinji," who had carried his bat to many a pavilion 
where English men and women had clapped their hands 
to him, on glorious days when there was sunlight on Eng- 
lish lawns. He took the club and stood at the wicket 
and was bowled third ball by a man who had only played 
cricket after ye manner of Stratford-atte-Bow. But then 
he found himself, handled the club Hke a sword, watched 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 155 

the ball with a falcon's eye, played with it. He was on 
the staff of the Indian Cavalry Corps, which was "to 
co-operate in exploiting any success." 

"To-morrow"we move," said one of the Scots Guards 
officers. The colonel of the battalion came to dinner at 
our mess, sitting down to a white tablecloth for the last 
time in his life. They played a game of cards, and went 
away earlier than usual. 

Two of them lingered after the colonel had gone. They 
drank more whisky. 

"We must be going," they said, but did not go. 

The deUcate-looking man could not hide the trouble in 
his eyes. 

"I sha'n't be killed this time," he said to a friend of 
mine. "I shall be badly wounded." 

The hard man, who loved flowers, drank his fourth 
glass of whisky. 

"It's going to be damned uncomfortable," he said. 
"I wish the filthy thing were over. Our generals will 
probably arrange some glorious little massacres. I know 
'em! . . . Well, good night, all." 

They went out into the darkness of the village lane. 
Battalions were already on the move, in the night. Their 
steady tramp of feet beat on the hard road. Their dark 
figures looked like an army of ghosts. Sparks were splut- 
tering out of the funnels of army cookers. A British 
soldier in full field kit was kissing a woman in the 
shadow-world of an estaminet. I passed close to them, 
almost touching them before I was aware of their 
presence. 

"Bonne chance!" said the woman. "Quand tu re- 
viens — " 

"One more kiss, lassie," said the man. 

"Mais comme tu es gourmand, toi!" 

He kissed her savagely, hungrily. Then he lurched off 
the sidewalk and formed up with other men in the 
darkness. 



156 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

The Scots Guards moved next morning. I stood by 
the side of the colonel, who was in a gruff mood. 

"It looks hke rain," he said, sniffing the air. **It will 
probably rain like hell when the battle begins.'* 

I think he was killed somewhere by Fosse 8. The two 
comrades in the Scots Guards were badly wounded. One 
of the young brothers was killed and the other maimed. 
I found their names in the casualty Hsts which filled col- 
umns of The Times for a long time after Loos. 



Ill 

The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in 
the Black Country of the French coal-fields. It was not 
much shelled in those days, though afterward — years after- 
ward — it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so that 
its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of 
war. 

Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise 
their prices exorbitantly. There were good shops in the 
town — "as good as Paris," said soldiers who had never 
been to Paris, but found these plate-glass windows daz- 
zling, after trench life, and loved to see the "mamzelles" 
behind the counters and walking out smartly, with little 
high-heeled shoes. There were tea-shops, crowded al- 
ways with officers on their way to the line or just out of 
it, and they liked to speak French with the girls who 
served them. Those girls saw the hunger in those men's 
eyes, who watched every movement they made, who tried 
to touch their hands and their frocks in passing. They 
knew they were desired, as daughters of Eve, by boys 
who were starved of love. They took that as part of 
their business, distributing cakes and buns without favor, 
with laughter in their eyes, and a merry word or two. 
Now and then, when they had leisure, they retired to 
inner rooms, divided by curtains from the shop, and sat 
on the knees of young British officers, while others played 
ragtime or sentimental ballads on untuned pianos. There 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 157 

was champagne as well as tea to be had in these bun- 
shops, but the A. P. M. was down on disorder or riotous 
gaiety, and there were no orgies. "Pas d'orgies," said 
the young ladies severely when things were getting a 
little too lively. They had to think of their business. 

Down side-streets here and there were houses where 
other women lived, not so severe in their point of view. 
Their business, indeed, did not permit of severity, and 
they catered for the hunger of men exiled year after year 
from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. 
They gave the base counterfeit of love in return for a few 
francs, and there were long lines of men — English, Irish, 
and Scottish soldiers — who waited their turn to get that 
vile imitation of life's romance from women who were 
bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than 
a few francs for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed 
them into swine for a while, until the spell passed, and 
would have blasted their souls if God were not under- 
standing of human weakness and of war. They paid in 
their bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who 
loved life and beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth 
and shell-fire, and were trained to kill, and knew that 
death was hunting for them and had all the odds of luck. 
Their children and their children's children will pay also 
for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and water- 
on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other 
evils which are the wages of sin, which flourished most 
rankly behind the fields of war. 

The inhabitants of Bethune — the shopkeepers, and 
brave little families of France, and bright-eyed girls, and 
frowzy women, and heroines, and harlots — came out into 
the streets before the battle of Loos, and watched the 
British army pouring through — battalions of Londoners 
and Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their 
faces, and grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns 
and limbers, drawn by hard-mouthed mules cursed and 
thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances, empty now, and 
wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after day. 



158 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"Bonne chance!" cried the women, waving hands and 
handkerchiefs. 

"Les pauvres enfants!" said the old women, wiping 
their eyes on dirty aprons. "We know how it is. They 
will be shot to pieces. It is always like that, in this sacred 
war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those dirty 
Boches! Those sacred bandits!" 

"They are going to give the Boches a hard knock," said 
grizzled men, who remembered in their boyhood another 
war. "The English army is ready. How splendid they 
are, those boys! And ours are on the right of them. 
This time — !" 

"Mother of God, hark at the guns!" 

At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered 
in the great square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward 
was smashed, and listened to the laboring of the guns 
over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines, and Gre- 
nay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the 
French guns were at work. There were loud, earth- 
shaking rumblings, and now and then enormous concus- 
sions. In the night sky lights rose in long, spreading 
bars of ruddy luminance, in single flashes, in sudden 
torches of scarlet flame rising to the clouds and touching 
them with rosy feathers. 

"'Cre nom de Dieu!" said French peasants, on the edge 
of all that, in villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Hou- 
dain, Grenay, Bruay, and Pernes. "The caldron is 
boiling up. . . . There will be a fine pot-au-feu." 

They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. 
Some of them knew, and crossed therriselves by wayside 
shrines for the sake of their sons' souls, or in their esta- 
minets cursed the Germans with the same old curses for 
having brought all this woe into the world. 

iv 

In those villages — Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and 
others — on the edge of the Black Country the Scottish 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 159 

troops of the 15th Division were in training for the arena, 
practising attacks on trenches and villages, getting a fine 
edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing, 
and having their morale heightened by addresses from 
brigadiers and divisional commanders on the glorious 
privilege which was about to be theirs of leading the 
assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of killing 
Germans. 

In one battalion of Scots — the loth Gordons, who were 
afterward the 8/ioth — there were conferences of com- 
pany commanders and whispered consultations of sub- 
alterns. They were "Kitche-ner" men, from Edinburgh 
and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came 
to know them all after this battle, and gave them fancy 
names in my despatches: the Georgian gentleman, as 
handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant soldier, who 
was several times wounded, but came back to command 
his old battalion, and then was wounded again nigh unto 
death, but came back again; and Honest John, slow of 
speech, with a twinkle in his eyes, careless of shell splinters 
flying around his bullet head, hard and tough and cunning 
in war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical face and 
freckles, and love of pretty girls and all children, until he 
was killed in Flanders; and the Permanent Temporary 
Lieutenant who fell on the Somme; and the Giant who 
had a splinter through his brain beyond Arras; and many 
other Highland gentlemen, and one English padre who 
went with them always to the trenches, until a shell took 
his head off at the crossroads. 

It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They 
were determined to go fast and go far. Their pride of 
race was stronger than the strain on their nerves. Many 
of them, I am certain, had no sense of fear, no apprehen- 
sion of death or wounds. Excitement, the comradeship 
of courage, the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above 
anxiety before the battle began, though here and there 
men like Ginger, of more delicate fiber, of imagination 
as well as courage, must have stared in great moments 



i6o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

at the grisly specter toward whom they would soon be 
walking. 

In other villages were battalions of the 47th London 
Division. They, too, were to be in the first line of attack, 
on the right of the Scots. They, too, had to win honor 
for the New Army and old London. They were a dif- 
ferent crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel- 
nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagina- 
tion, more instinctive revolt against the butchery that was 
to come. But they, too, had been *' doped" for morale, 
their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches 
addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be 
London's day out. They were to fight for the glory of 
the old town . . . the old town where they had Hved in 
little suburban houses with flower-gardens, where they 
had gone up by the early morning trains to city offices 
and government offices and warehouses and shops, in 
days before they ever guessed they would go a-soldiering, 
and crouch in shell-holes under high explosives, and thrust 
sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their 
best. They would go through with it. They would keep 
their sense of humor and make cockney jokes at death. 
They would show the stuff of London pride. 

"Domine, dirige nos!" 

I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in 
tea-shops with them when they were playing dominoes, 
before the war, as though that were the most important 
game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball 
in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and 
I was Richard Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers 
of life — chroniclers of passing history. I remained the 
onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into the arena. 
He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became a 
dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and after- 
ward sat in shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew 
that death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had 
played chess with one man whom afterward I met as a 
gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE i6i 

when a shell had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, 
and other shells made a mess of blood and flesh in his 
wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the 
first to recognize a face from the world of peace. After 
his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and 
the Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was an- 
other officer in the 47th London Division whom I had 
known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, 
not twenty when he had fought through several battles. 
He and hundreds like him had been playing at red 
Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years before an 
August in 1914. . . . The 47th London Division, going 
forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose 
souls had been shaped by all the influences of environ- 
ment, habit, and tradition in which I had been born and 
bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous 
roar of London traffic. Their first adventures had been 
on London Commons. The lights along the Embankment, 
the excitement of the streets, the faces of London crowds, 
royal pageantry — marriages, crownings, burials — on the 
way to Westminster, the little dramas of London life, had 
been woven into the fiber of their thoughts, and it was 
the spirit of London which went with them wherever 
they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than 
country men to the things they saw. Some of them had 
to fight against their nerves on the way to Loos. But 
their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that 
battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of 
courage. 



I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos 
battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les- 
Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to 
the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were 
hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when 
there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to 
know the ground from many points of view. It was a 



i62 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and 
Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges 
of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number 
of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, 
which were called Fosses. Around those black mounds 
there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and Fosse lo and 
Puits I4bis, and the Double Grassier near Loos, because 
they gave observation and were important to capture or 
hold. Near them were the pit-heads, with winding-gear 
in elevated towers of steel which were smashed and twisted 
by gun-fire; and in Loos itself were two of those towers 
joined by steel girders and gantries, called the "Tower 
Bridge" by men of London. Rows of red cottages where 
the French miners had hved were called coronSy and where 
they were grouped into large units they were called cites, 
like the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite St.-Pierre, and the 
Cite St.-Laurent, beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts of Lens. 
All those places were abandoned now by black-grimed 
men who had fled down mine-shafts and galleries with 
their women and children, and had come up on our side 
of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or Bully-Grenay, 
where they still lived close to the war. Shells pierced 
the roof of the church in that squalid village of Noeux- 
les-Mines and smashed some of the cottages and killed 
some of the people now and then. Later in the war, 
when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril over- 
shadowed them with terror, and they hved in their cellars 
after dusk, and sometimes were buried there. But they 
would not retreat farther back — not many of them — and 
on days of battle I saw groups of French miners and 
dirty-bloused girls excited by the passage of our troops 
and by the walking wounded who came stumbhng back, 
and by stretcher cases unloaded from ambulances to the 
floors of their dirty cottages. High velocities fell in some 
of the streets, shrapnel-shells whined overhead and burst 
like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France slouched 
around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our 
men in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 163 

if they did not come too near. I saw lightly wounded 
girls among them, with bandaged heads and hands, but 
they did not think that a reason for escape. With 
smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers 
in steel hats and clasped their arms or leaned against 
their shoulders. They had known many of those men 
before. They were their sweethearts. In those foul little 
mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, 
because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept 
company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges 
for keepsakes, and taught them a base patois of French, 
and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when the boys 
went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were 
kind-hearted little sluts with astounding courage. 

** Aren't you afraid of this place.?" I asked one of them 
in Bully-Grenay when it was "unhealthy" there. "You 
might be killed here any minute." 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

"Je m'en fiche de la mort!" ("I don't care a damn 
about death.") 

I had the same answer from other girls in other places. 

That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos — those 
mining towns behind the lines, then a maze of communi- 
cation trenches entered from a place called Philosophe, 
leading up to the trench-Hnes beyond Vermelles, and 
running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite 
Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had 
his trenches and earthworks among the slag heaps, the 
pit-heads, the corons and the citesy all broken by gun-fire, 
and nowhere a sign of human life aboveground, in which 
many men were hidden. 

Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a 
week before the battle. It was our first demonstration 
of those stores of high-explosive shells which had been 
made by the speeding up of munition-work in England, 
and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily 
since the coming out of the New Army. The weather 



i64 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

was heavy with mist and a drizzle of rain. Banks of 
smoke made a pall over all the arena of war, and it was 
stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting shells. 
I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, 
hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by 
that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. 
There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, 
no heroic episode — only through, rifts in the smoke the 
blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking 
ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German 
dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German 
bodies tossed up with earth and stones — all that was 
certain but invisible. 

"Very boring," said an officer by my side. "Not a 
damn thing to be seen." 

"Our men ought to have a walk-over," said an opti- 
mist. "Any living German must be a gibbering idiot 
with shell-shock." 

"I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts," said 
the officer who was bored. "Even high explosives don't 
go down very deep." 

"It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! 
It seems more than human. It's like some convulsion of 
nature." 

"There's no adventure in modern war," said the bored 
man. "It's a dirty scientific business. I'd kill all chem- 
ists and explosive experts." 

"Our men will have adventure enough when they go 
over the top at dawn. Hell must be a game compared 
with that." 

The guns went on pounding away, day after day, labor- 
ing, pummeling, hammering, Hke Thor with his thunder- 
bolts. It was the preparation for battle. No men were 
out of the trenches yet, though some were being killed 
there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and 
outside the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of 
Vermelles, and away up at Cambrin and Givenchy. The 
German guns were answering back intermittently, but 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 165 

holding most of their fire until human flesh came out into 
the open. The l)attle began at dawn on September 25th. 



VI 



In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his 
troops away from the main battle-front, "subsidiary at- 
tacks" were made upon the German lines as far north as 
Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres, and southward 
to La Bassee Canal at Givenchy, by the troops of the 
Second and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John 
French, in his despatch, "was most effectively achieved." 
It was achieved by the bloody sacrifice of many brave 
battahons in the 3d and 14th Divisions (Yorkshire, Royal 
Scots, King's Royal Rifles, and others), and by the 
Meerut Division of the Indian Corps, who set out to 
attack terrible Hnes without suflicient artillery support, 
and without reserves behind them, and without any 
chance of holding the ground they might capture. It was 
part of the system of war. They were the pawns of 
"strategy," serving a high purpose in a way that seemed 
to them without reason. Not for them was the glory of 
a victorious assault. Their job was to "demonstrate" 
by exposing their bodies to devouring fire, and by attack- 
ing earthworks which they were not expected to hold. 
Here and there men of ours, after their rush over No 
Man's Land under a deadly sweep of machine-gun fire, 
flung themselves into the enemy's trenches, bayoneting 
the Germans and capturing the greater part of their 
first line. There they lay panting among wounded and 
dead, and after that shoveled up earth and burrowed to 
get cover from the shelling which was soon to fall on them. 
Quickly the enemy discovered their whereabouts and laid 
down a barrage fire which, with deadly accuracy, plowed 
up their old front line and tossed it about on the pitch- 
forks of bursting shells. Our men's bodies were mangled 
in that earth. High explosives plunged into the midst 
of little groups crouching in holes and caverns of the 



i66 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ground, and scattered their limbs. Living, unwounded 
men lay under those screaming shells with the panting 
hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men 
crawled back over No Man's Land, and some were blown 
to bits as they crawled, and others got back. Before 
nightfall, in the dark, a general retirement was ordered 
to our original line in that northern sector, owing to the 
increasing casualties under the relentless work of the 
German guns. Like ants on the move, thousands of 
men rose from the upheaved earth, and with their stom- 
achs close to it, crouching, came back, dragging their 
wounded. The dead were left. 

"On the front of the Third Army," wrote Sir John 
French, "subsidiary operations of a similar nature were 
successfully carried out." 

From the point of view of high generalship those hold- 
ing attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From 
the point of view of mothers' sons they had been a bloody 
shambles without any gain. The point of view depends 
on the angle of vision. 

VII 

Let me now tell the story of tha main battle of Loos 
as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of 
men in different parts of the field — no man could see 
more than his immediate neighborhood — and from the 
officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology 
of battle, with many strange incidents which happened 
to men when their spirit was upHfted by that mingling 
of exultation and fear which is heroism, and with queer 
episodes almost verging on comedy in the midst of death 
and agony, at the end of a day of victory, most ghastly 
failure. 

The three attacking divisions from left to right on 
the line opposite the villages of Hulluch and Loos were 
the 1st, the 15th (Scottish), and the 47th (London). 
Higher up, opposite Hulluch and Haisnes, the 9th (Scot- 
tish) Division and the 7th Division were in front of the 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 167 

Hohenzollern redoubt (chalky earthworks thrust out 
beyond the German front-Hne trenches, on rising ground) 
and some chalk-quarries. 

The men of those divisions were lined up during the 
night in the communication trenches, which had been 
dug by the sappers and laid with miles of telephone wire. 
They were silent, except for the chink of shovels and side- 
arms, the shuffle of men's feet, their hard breathing, and 
occasional words of command. At five-thirty, when the 
guns in all our batteries were firing at full blast, with a 
constant scream of shells over the heads of the waiting 
men, and when the first faint light of day stole into the 
sky, there was a slight rain falling, and the wind blew 
lightly from the southwest. 

In the front-line trenches a number of men were busy 
with some long, narrow cylinders, which had been carried 
up a day before. They were arranging them in the mud 
of the parapets with their nozles facing the enemy lines. 

"That's the stuff to give them!" 

*'What is it.?" 

"Poison-gas. Worse than they used at Ypres." 

"Christ! . . . supposing we have to walk through it?" 

"We shall walk behind it. The wind will carry it down 
the throat of the Fritzes. We shall find 'em dead." 

So men I met had talked of that new weapon which 
most of them hated. 

It was at five-thirty when the men busy with the cylin- 
ders turned on little taps. There was a faint hissing 
noise, the escape of gas from many pipes. A heavy, 
whitish cloud came out of the cylinders and traveled 
aboveground as it was lifted and carried forward by the 
breeze. 

"How's the gas working?" asked a Scottish officer. 

"Going fine!" said an English officer. But he looked 
anxious, and wetted a finger and held it up, to get the 
direction of the wind. 

Some of the communication trenches were crowded 
with the Black Watch of the ist Division, hard, bronzed 



i68 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

fellows, with the red heckle in their bonnets. (It was 
before the time of steel hats.) They were leaning up 
against the walls of the trenches, waiting. They were 
strung round with spades, bombs, and sacks. 

"A queer kind o' stink!" said one of them, sniffing. 

Some of the men began coughing. Others were rub- 
bing their eyes, as though they smarted. 

The poison-gas. . . . The wind had carried it half way 
across No Man's Land, then a swirl changed its course, 
and flicked it down a gully, and swept it right round to 
the Black Watch in the narrow trenches. Some German 
shell-fire was coming, too. In one small bunch eight men 
fell in a mush of blood and raw flesh. But the gas was 
worse. There was a movement in the trenches, the hud- 
dling together of frightened men who had been very 
brave. They were coughing, spitting, gasping. Some of 
them fell limp against their fellows, with pallid cheeks 
which blackened. Others tied handkerchiefs about their 
mouths and noses, but choked inside those bandages, and 
dropped to earth with a clatter of shovels. Officers and 
men were cursing and groaning. An hour later, when 
the whistles blew, there were gaps in the line of the ist 
Division which went over the top. In the trenches lay 
gassed men. In No Man's Land others fell, swept by 
machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives. The 
1st Division was ''checked." . . . 

"We caught it badly," said some of them I met later 
in the day, bandaged and bloody, and plastered in wet 
chalk, while gassed men lay on stretchers about them, 
unconscious, with laboring lungs. 

VIII 

Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) 
Division climbed over their parapets at six-thirty, and 
saw the open ground before them, and the dusky, paling 
sky above them, and broken wire in front of the enemy's 
churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly. 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 169 

and far away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly 
outline of the *'Tower Bridge" of Loos, which was their 
goal. For an hour there were steady tides of men all 
streaming slowly up those narrow communication ways, 
cut through the chalk to get into the light also, where 
death was in ambush for many of them somewhere in the 
shadows of that dawn. 

By seven-forty the two assaulting brigades of the 15th 
Division had left the trenches and were in the open. 
Shriller than the scream of shells above them was the 
skirl of pipes, going with them. The Pipe Major of the 
8th Gordons was badly wounded, but refused to be touched 
until the other men were tended. He was a giant, too big for 
a stretcher, and had to be carried back on a tarpauhn. At 
the dressing-station his leg was amputated, but he died 
after two operations, and the Gordons mourned him. 

While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, 
two brigades of the Londoners, on their right, were ad- 
vancing in the direction of the long, double slag heap, 
southwest of Loos, called the Double Grassier, Some of 
them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall 
song of "Hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!" and 
the "Robert E. Lee," until one after another a musician 
fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel burst over them, and 
here and there shells plowed up the earth where they 
were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French 
still stayed in their trenches — their own attack was post- 
poned until midday — and they cheered the London men, 
as they went forward, with cries of, " Vivent les Anglais!'' 
''A mort — les Bochesf It was they who saw one man 
kicking a football in advance of the others. 

"He is mad!" they said. "The poor boy is a lunatic!" 

"He is not mad," said a French officer who had Hved 
in England. "It is a beau geste. He is a sportsman 
scornful of death. That is the British sport." 

It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward 
the goal, and he held it for fourteen hundred yards — the 
best-kicked goal in history. 



I70 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's 
Land. But they were not missed then by those who went 
on in waves — rather, like molecules, separating, collect- 
ing, splitting up into smaller groups, bunching together 
again, on the way to the first line of German trenches. 
A glint of bayonets made a quickset hedge along the line 
of churned-up earth which had been the Germans' front- 
line trench. Our guns had cut the wire or torn gaps into 
it. Through the broken strands went the Londoners on 
the right, the Scots on the left, shouting hoarsely now. 
They saw red. They were hunters of human flesh. 
They swarmed down into the first long ditch, trampling 
over dead bodies, falling over them, clawing the earth 
and scrambling up the parados, all broken and crumbled, 
then on again to another ditch. Boys dropped with bul- 
lets in their brains, throats, and bodies. German ma- 
chine-guns were at work at close range. 

"Give *em hell!" said an ofiicer of the Londoners — a boy 
of nineteen. There were a lot of living Germans in the 
second ditch, and in holes about. Some of them stood 
still, as though turned to clay, until they fell with half 
the length of a bayonet through their stomachs. Others 
shrieked and ran a little way before they died. Others 
sat behind hillocks of earth, spraying our men with ma- 
chine-gun bullets until bombs were hurled on them and 
they were scattered into lumps of flesh. 

Three lines of trench were taken, and the Londoners 
and the Scots went forward again in a spate toward Loos. 
All the way from our old lines men were streaming up, 
with shells bursting among them or near them. 

On the way to Loos a company of Scots came face to 
face with a tall German. He was stone-dead, with a 
bullet in his brain, his face all blackened with the grime 
of battle; but he stood erect in the path, wedged somehow 
in a bit of trench. The Scots stared at this figure, and 
their line parted and swept each side of him, as though 
some obscene specter barred the way. Rank after rank 
streamed up, and then a big tide of men poured through 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 171 

the German trench systems and rushed forward. Three- 
quarters of a mile more to Loos. Some of them were 
panting, out of breath, speechless. Others talked to the 
men about them in stray sentences. Most of them were 
silent, staring ahead of them and licking their lips with 
swollen tongues. They w^ere parched with thirst, some of 
them told me. Many stopped to drink the last drop out of 
their water-bottles. As one man drank he spun round 
and fell with a thud on his face. Machine-gun bullets 
were whipping up the earth. From Loos came a loud 
and constant rattle of machine-guns. Machine-guns 
were firing out of the broken windows of the houses and 
from the top of the "Tower Bridge," those steel girders 
which rose three hundred feet high from the center of 
the village, and from slit trenches across the narrow 
streets. There were one hundred machine-guns in the 
cemetery to the southwest of the town, pouring out lead 
upon the Londoners who had to pass that place. 

Scots and London men were mixed up, and mingled in 
crowds which encircled Loos, and forced their way into 
the village; but roughly still, and in the mass, they were 
Scots who assaulted Loos itself, and London men who 
went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double Grassier. 

It was eight o'clock in the morning when the first crowds 
reached the village, and for nearly two hours afterward 
there was street-fighting. 

It was the fighting of men in the open, armed with bay- 
onets, rifles, and bombs, against men invisible and in 
hiding, with machine-guns. Small groups of Scots, like 
packs of wolves, prowled around the houses, where the 
lower rooms and cellars were crammed with Germans, 
trapped and terrified, but still defending themselves. In 
some of the houses they would not surrender, afraid of 
certain death, anyhow, and kept the Scots at bay awhile 
until those kilted men flung themselves in and killed their 
enemy to the last man. Outside those red-brick houses 
lay dead and wounded Scots. Inside there were the curses 
and screams of a bloody vengeance. In other houses the 



172 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

machine-gun garrisons ceased fire and put white rags 
through the broken windows, and surrendered Hke sheep. 
So it was in one house entered by a Httle kilted signaler, 
who shot down three men who tried to kill him. Thirty 
others held their hands up and said, in a chorus of fear, 
*'Kamerad! Kamerad!" 

A company of the 8th Gordons were among the first 
into Loos, led by some of those Highland officers I have 
mentioned on another page. It was "Honest John" who 
led one crowd of them, and he claims now, with a laugh, 
that he gained his Military Cross for saving the lives of 
two hundred Germans. *'I ought to have got the Royal 
Humane Society's medal," he said. Those Germans — 
Poles, really, from Silesia — came swarming out of a house 
with their hands up. But the Gordons had tasted blood. 
They were hungry for it. They were panting and shout- 
ing, with red bayonets, behind their officer. 

That young man thought deeply and quickly. If there 
were **no quarter" it might be ugly for the Gordons later 
in the day, and the day was young, and Loos was still 
untaken. 

He stood facing his own men, ordered them sternly to 
keep steady. These men were to be taken prisoners and 
sent back under escort. He had his revolver handy, and, 
anyhow, the men knew him. They obeyed, grumbling 
sullenly. 

There was the noise of fire in other parts of the village, 
and the tap-tap-tap of machine-guns from many cellars. 
Bombing-parties of Scots silenced those machine-gunners 
at last by going to the head of the stairways and flinging 
down their hand-grenades. The cellars of Loos were full 
of dead. 

In one of them, hours after the fighting had ceased 
among the ruins of the village, and the line of fire was 
forward of Hill 70, a living man still hid and carried on 
his work. The colonel of one of our forward battalions 
came into Loos with his signalers and runners, and estab- 
lished his headquarters in a house almost untouched by 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 173 

shell-fire. At the time there was very little shelling, as 
the artillery officers on either side were afraid of killing 
their own men, and the house seemed fairly safe for the 
purpose of a temporary signal-station. 

But the colonel noticed that shortly after his arrival 
heavy shells began to fall very close and the Germans 
obviously were aiming directly for this building. He 
ordered the cellars to be searched, and three Germans 
were found. It was only after he had been in the house 
for forty minutes that in a deeper cellar, which had not 
been seen before, the discovery was made of a German 
officer who was telephoning to his own batteries and 
directing their fire. Suspecting that the colonel and his 
companions were important officers directing general 
operations, he had caused the shells to fall upon the house, 
knowing that a lucky shot would mean his own death 
as well as theirs. 

As our searchers came into the cellar, he rose and stood 
there, waiting, with a cold dignity, for the fate which he 
knew would come to him, as it did. He was a very brave 
man. 

Another German officer remained hiding in the church, 
which was so heavily mined that it would have blown 
half the village into dust and ashes if he had touched ofF 
the charges. He was fumbling at the job when our men 
found and killed him. 

In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, 
the Londoners had a bloody fight among the tombstones, 
where nests of German machine-guns had been built into 
the vaults. New corpses, still bleeding, lay among old 
dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire. Londoners and 
Silesian Germans lay together across one another's bodies. 
The London men routed out most of the machine-gunners 
and bayoneted some and took prisoners of others. They 
were not so fierce as the Scots, but in those hours forgot 
the flower-gardens in Streatham and Tooting Bee and the 
manners of suburban drawing-rooms. ... It is strange 
that one German machine-gun, served by four men, re- 



174 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

mained hidden behind a gravestone all through that day, 
and Saturday, and Sunday, and sniped stray men of ours 
until routed at last by moppers-up of the Guards brigade. 

As the Londoners came down the slope to the southern 
edge of Loos village, through a thick haze of smoke from 
shell-fire and burning houses, they were astounded to 
meet a crowd of civihans, mostly women and children, 
who came streaming across the open in panic-stricken 
groups. Some of them fell under machine-gun fire snap- 
ping from the houses or under shrapnel bursting over- 
head. The women were haggard and gaunt, with wild 
eyes and wild hair, like witches. They held their children 
in tight claws until they were near our soldiers, when 
they all set up a shrill crying and wailing. The children 
were dazed with terror. Other civilians crawled up from 
their cellars in Loos, spattered with German blood, and 
wandered about among soldiers of many British battalions 
who crowded amid the scarred and shattered houses, and 
among the wounded men who came staggering through 
the streets, where army doctors were giving first aid in 
the roadway, while shells were bursting overhead and all 
the roar of the battle filled the air for miles around with 
infernal tumult. 

Isolated Germans still kept sniping from secret places, 
and some of them fired at a dressing-station in the market- 
place, until a French girl, afterward decorated for valor — ■ 
she was called the Lady of Loos by Londoners and Scots 
— borrowed a revolver and shot two of them dead in a 
neighboring house. Then she came back to the soup she 
was making for wounded men. 

Some of the German prisoners were impressed as 
stretcher-bearers, and one," Jock, '* had compelled four 
Germans to carry him in, while he lay talking to them in 
broadest Scots, grinning despite his blood and wounds. 

A London lieutenant called out to a stretcher-bearer 
helping to carry down a German officer, and was astounded 
to be greeted by the wounded man. 

"Hullo, Leslie! ... I knew we should meet one day." 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 175 

Looking at the man's face, the Londoner saw it was his 
own cousin. . . . There was all the drama of war in that 
dirty village of Loos, which reeked with the smell of death 
then, and years later, when I went walking through it 
on another day of war, after another battle on Hill 70, 
beyond. 

IX 

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of 
men, wounded, dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, 
women, doctors, Highlanders and Lowlanders "fey" with 
the intoxication of blood, London soldiers with tattered 
uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed 
brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The 
orders of the Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go "all 
out," and to press on as far as they could, with the abso- 
lute assurance that all the ground they gained would be 
held behind them by supporting troops; and having that 
promise, they trudged on to Hill 70. The Londoners 
had been ordered to make a defensive flank on the right 
of the Scots by capturing the chalk-pit south of Loos 
and digging in. They did this after savage fighting in 
the pit, where they bayoneted many Germans, though 
raked by machine-gun bullets from a neighboring copse, 
v/hich was a fringe of gashed and tattered trees. But 
some of the London boys were mixed up with the advanc- 
ing Scots and went on with them, and a battalion of Scots 
Fusiliers who had been in the supporting brigade of the 
15th Division, which was intended to follow the advance, 
joined the first assault, either through eagerness or a 
wrong order, and, unknown to their brigadier, were among 
the leaders in the bloody struggle in Loos, and labored 
on to Hill 70, where Camerons, Gordons, Black Watch, 
Seaforths, Argyll, and Sutherland men and Londoners 
were now up the slopes, stabbing stray Germans who were 
trying to retreat to a redoubt on the reverse side of the 
hill. 

For a time there was a kind of Bank Holiday crowd on 



176 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Hill 70. The German gunners, knowing that the redoubt 
on the crest was still held by their men, dared not fire; 
and many German batteries were on the move, out of 
Lens and from their secret lairs in the country there- 
abouts, in a state of panic. On our right the French were 
fighting desperately at Souchez and Neuville St.-Vaast 
and up the lower slopes of Vimy, suffering horrible cas- 
ualties and failing to gain the heights in spite of the reck- 
less valor of their men, but alarming the German staffs, 
who for a time had lost touch with the situation — their 
telephones had been destroyed by gun-fire — and were 
filled with gloomy apprehensions. So Hill 70 was qiyet, 
except for spasms of machine-gun fire from the redoubt 
on the German side of the slope and the bombing of 
German dugouts, or the bayoneting of single men routed 
out from holes in the earth. 

One of our men came face to face with four Germans, 
two of whom were armed with rifles and two with bombs. 
They were standing in the wreckage of a trench, pallid, 
and with the fear of death in their eyes. The rifles clat- 
tered to the earth, the bombs fell at their feet, and their 
hands went up when the young Scot appeared before them 
with his bayonet down. He was alone, and they could 
have killed him, but surrendered, and were glad of the 
life he granted them. As more men came up the slope 
there were greetings between comrades, of: 

"Hullo, Jock!" 

"Is that you, Alf?" 

They were rummaging about for souvenirs in half- 
destroyed dugouts where dead bodies lay. They were 
"swapping" souvenirs — -taken from prisoners — silver 
watches, tobacco-boxes, revolvers, compasses. Many of 
them put on German field-caps, like schoolboys with 
paper caps from Christmas crackers, shouting with laugh- 
ter because of their German look. They thought the 
battle was won. After the first wild rush the shell-fire, 
the killing, the sight of dead comrades, the smell of blood, 
the nightmare of that hour after dawn, they were begin- 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 177 

ning to get normal again, to be conscious of themselves, 
to rejoice in their luck at having got so far with whole 
skins. It had been a fine victory. The enemy was no- 
where. He had "mizzled off." 

Some of the Scots, with the hunter*s instinct still 
strong, decided to go on still farther to a new objective. 
They straggled away in batches to one of the suburbs of 
Lens — the Cite St.-Auguste. Very few of them came 
back with the tale of their comrades' slaughter by sudden 
bursts of machine-gun fire which cut off all chance of 
retreat. . . . 

The quietude of Hill 70 was broken by the beginning 
of a new bombardment from German guns. 

"Dig in," said the officers. "We must hold on at all 
costs until the supports come up." 

Where were the supporting troops which had been 
promised.? There was no sign of them coming forward 
from Loos. The Scots were strangely isolated on the 
slopes of Hill 70. At night the sky above them was lit 
up by the red glow of fires in Lens, and at twelve-thirty 
that night, under that ruddy sky, dark figures moved on 
the east of the hill and a storm of machine-gun bullets 
swept down on the Highlanders and Lowlanders, who 
crouched low in the mangled earth. It was a counter- 
attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from 
the reverse side and trying to get the Scots out of the 
slopes below. But the men of the 15th Division an- 
swered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire, and 
bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded 
men thinning out their fighting strength. At five-thirty 
in the morning there was another strong counter-attack, 
repulsed also, but at another price of life in those holes 
and ditches on the hillside. 

Scottish officers stared anxiously back toward their old 
lines. Where were the supports .f" Why did they get no 
help.? Why were they left clinging like this to an isolated 
hill? The German artillery had reorganized. They were 
barraging the ground about Loos fiercely and continu- 



178 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ously. They were covering a great stretch of country 
up to Hulluch, and north of it, with intense harassing fire. 
Later on that Saturday morning the 15th Division re- 
ceived orders to attack and capture the German earth- 
work redoubt on the crest of the hill. A brigade of the 
2 1st Division was nominally in support of them, but only 
small groups of that brigade appeared on the scene, a 
few white-faced officers, savage with anger, almost mad 
with some despair in them, with batches of English lads 
who looked famished with hunger, weak after long march- 
ing, demoralized by some tragedy that had happened to 
them. They were Scots who did most of the work in 
trying to capture the redoubt, the same Scots who had 
fought through Loos. They tried to reach the crest. 
Again and again they crawled forward and up, but the 
blasts of machine-gun fire mowed them down, and many 
young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with 
their kilts riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, 
or arms, or legs, writhed like snakes back to the cover of 
broken trenches. 

"Where are the supports?" asked the Scottish officers. 
"In God's name, where are the troops who were to follow 
on? Why did we do all this bloody fighting to be hung 
up in the air like this ? " 

The answer to their question has not been given in any 
official despatch. It is answered by the tragedy of the 
2 1st and 24th Divisions, who will never forget the misery 
of that day, though not many are now alive who suffered 
it. Their part of the battle I will tell later. 



To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on 
that day of September 25th — of victory and its price. I 
met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly 
"Jocks," and they were in exalted spirits because they 
had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, 
and out of it — alive. They came straggling back through 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 179 

the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing- 
stations and ambulance-trains. Some of them had the 
sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, 
brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. 
Some of them were wounded in the legs and hobbled with 
their arms about their comrades' necks. Their kilts were 
torn and plastered with chalky mud. Nearly all of them 
had some "souvenir" of the fighting — German watches, 
caps, cartridges. They carried themselves with a warrior 
look, so hard, so lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of 
the Black Watch and Camerons and Gordons. They 
told tales of their own adventure in broad Scots, hard to 
understand, and laughed grimly at the killing they had 
done, though here and there a lad among them had a 
look of bad remembrance in his eyes, and older men spoke 
gravely of the scenes on the battlefield and called it 
"heUish." But their pride was high. They had done 
what they had been asked to do. The 15th Division had 
proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in his- 
tory, had gained new honor. 

Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed 
about a long ambulance-train standing in a field near the 
village of Choques. They crowded the carriages, leaned 
out of the windows with their bandaged heads and arms, 
shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The 
spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, 
drugged them. And now they were going home for a 
spell. Home to bonny Scotland, with a wound that 
would take some time to heal. 

There were other wounded men from whom no laughter 
came, nor any sound. They were carried to the train on 
stretchers, laid down awhile on the wooden platforms, 
covered with blankets up to their chins — unless they un- 
covered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw 
one young Londoner so smashed about the face that only 
his eyes were uncovered between layers of bandages, and 
they were glazed with the first film of death. Another 
had his jaw blown clean away, so the doctor told me, and 



i8o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the upper half of his face was Hvid and discolored by ex- 
plosive gases. A splendid boy of the Black Watch was 
but a living trunk. Both his arms and both his legs were 
shattered. If he lived after butcher's work of surgery he 
would be one of those who go about in boxes on wheels, 
from whom men turn their eyes away, sick with a sense 
of horror. There were blind boys led to the train by 
wounded comrades, . groping, very quiet, thinking of a 
life of darkness ahead of them — forever in the darkness 
which shut in their souls. For days and weeks that fol- 
lowed there was always a procession of ambulances on 
the way to the dirty little town of Lillers, and going along 
the roads I used to look back at them and see the soles 
of muddy boots upturned below brown blankets. It was 
more human wreckage coming down from the salient of 
Loos, from the chalk-pits of Hulluch and the tumbled 
earth of the Flohenzollern redoubt, which had been partly 
gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a 
square brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, 
and for a time a casualty clearing-station, the *'bad"; 
cases were unloaded; men with chunks of steel in their: 
lun^ and bowels were vomiting great gobs of blood, men 
with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without 
noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps,' 
men without faces. . . . 

XI 

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy 
village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of 
France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among 
them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning, 
when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky 
overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours. 

There were fourteen hundred German prisoners await- 
ing entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet 
earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our 
fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with fixed bay- 
onets. They were the men who had surrendered from 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE i8i 

deep dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and 
from the cellars of Loos itself. They had seen many of 
their comrades bayoneted. Some of them had shrieked 
for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power of 
sound in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight 
of glinting bayonets, with an animal fear of death. Now, 
all that was a nightmare memory, and they were out of it 
all until the war should end, next year, the year after, 
the year after that — ^who could tell.? 

They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their 
gray uniforms were still soddened. Many of them were 
sleeping, in huddled, grotesque postures, like dead men, 
some lying on their stomachs, face downward. Others 
were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads 
and a beaten, exhausted look. Others paced up and 
down, up and down, like caged animals, as they were, 
famished and parched, until we could distribute the ra- 
tions. Many of them were dying, and a German ambu- 
lance-man went among them, injecting them with mor- 
phine to ease the agony which made them writhe and 
groan. Two men held their stomachs, moaning and whim- 
pering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by 
cold and damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doc- 
tor. A friend of mine carried a water-jar to some of the 
wounded and held it to their lips. One of them refused. 
He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a bloody rag round 
his head — 3. typical "Hun," I thought. But he pointed 
to a comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in 
German, "He needs it first." This man had never heard 
of Sir Phihp Sidney, who at Zutphen, when thirsty and 
near death, said, "His need is greater than mine," but he 
had the same chivalry in his soul. 

The officer in charge of their escort could not speak 
German and had no means of explaining to the prisoners 
that they were to take their turn to get rations and water 
at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent — young 
Valentine Wilhams, afterward a very gallant officer in 
the Irish Guards — ^who gave the orders in fluent and in- 



i82 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

cisive German. He began with a hoarse shout of "Ach- 
tung!" and that old word of command had an electrical 
effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed 
asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. 
The habit of discipline was part of their very life, and 
men almost dead strove to obey. 

The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw 
and distribute the rations, and then those prisoners 
clutched at hunks of bread and ate in a famished way, 
like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days 
hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, 
and intense hunger gave them a kind of vitality when 
food appeared. The sight of that mass of men reduced 
to such depths of human misery was horrible. One had 
no hate in one's heart for them then. 

"Poor devils!" said an officer with me. "Poor beasts! 
. . . Here we see the ' glory ' of war ! the * romance * of war ! " 

I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood 
their answer. 

"It is better here than on the battlefield," said one of 
them. "We are glad to be prisoners." 

One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns 
which were firing ceaselessly. 

"I pity our poor people there," he said. 

One of them, who spoke English, described all he had 
seen of the battle, which was not much, because no man 
at such a time sees more than what happens within a 
yard or two. 

"The English caught us by surprise when the attack 
came at last," he said. "The bombardment had been 
going on for days, and we could not guess when the 
attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering 
how long it would be before a shell came through the roof 
and blow us to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. 
Wounded men crawled into the dugout, and some of them 
died down there. We sat looking at their bodies in the 
doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a 
lull came. A friend of mine was there, dead, and I 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 183 

stepped on his stomach to get upstairs. The first thing 
I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming past our 
trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our 
position was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, 
but it was only asking for death. Your men killed them 
with bayonets. I went back into my dugout and waited. 
Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part 
of the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his 
head blown oflF, and his blood spurted on me. I was 
dazed, but through the fumes I saw an EngHsh soldier 
in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to 
throw another bomb. 

"I shouted to him in English: 

" ' Don't kill us ! We surrender ! ' 

"He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he 
would throw his bomb. Then he said: 

"'Come out, you swine.' 

"So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, 
your Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill 
us, but one man argued with them in words I could not 
understand — a^ dialect — and we were told to go along a 
trench. Even then we expected death, but came to an- 
other group of prisoners, and joined them on their way 
back. Gott sei dank!" 

He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, 
who had been a clerk in a London office. He had the 
truthfulness of a man who had just come from great horrors. 

Many of the men around him were Silesians — more 
Polish than German. Some of them could not speak 
more than a few words of German, and were true Slavs in 
physical type, with flat cheek-bones. 

A group of German artillery officers had been captured 
and they were behaving with studied arrogance and in- 
solence as they smoked cigarettes apart from the men, 
and looked in a jeering way at our officers. 

"Did you get any of our gas this morning?" I asked 
them, and one of them laughed and shrugged his shoulders. 

"I smelled it a little. It was rather nice. . . . The Eng- 



1 84 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

lish always imitate the German war-methods, but with- 
out much success." 

They grinned and imitated my way of saying "Gziten 
Tag" when I left them. It took a year or more to tame 
the arrogance of the German officer. At the end of the 
Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, 
and was very polite. 

In another place — a prison in St.-Omer — I had a con- 
versation with two other officers of the German army who 
were more courteous than the gunners. They had been 
taken at Hooge and were both Prussians — one a stout 
captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, 
jovial manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which 
he had just escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a 
young, slim fellow, with clear-cut features, who was very 
nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels together, 
as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers 
came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. 
One of our mines had exploded under him, flinging a 
heap of earth over him. The fat man by his side — his 
captain — had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had 
scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth. 

They were cautious about answering questions on the 
war, but the younger man said they were prepared down 
to the last gaiter for another winter campaign and — that 
seemed to me at the time a fine touch of audacity — for 
two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of 
'i6, after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after 
that the winter of ' 17 ! The words of that young Prussian 
seemed to me, the more I thought of them, idiotic and 
almost insane. Why, the world itself could not suffer 
two more years of war. It would end before then in 
general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all 
fronts. Humanity of every nation would revolt against 
such prolonged slaughter. ... It was I who was mad, in 
the foolish faith that the war would end before another 
year had passed, because I thought that would be the 
limit of endurance of such mutual massacre. 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 185 

In a room next to those two ojfficers — a week before this 
battle, the captain had been rowing with his wife on the 
lake at Potsdam — ^was another prisoner, who wept and 
wept. He had escaped to our lines before the battle to 
save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and 
thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his con- 
science most was the thought that his wife and children 
would lose their allowances because of his treachery. 
He stared at us with wild, red eyes. 

'^ Achy mein armes Weihl Meine Kinder! ... Achy Gott 
in Himmelf" 

He had no pride, no dignity, no courage. 

This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his 
hands against the wall and laid his head on his arm and 
wept. 

XII 

During the battle, for several days I went with other 
men to various points of view, trying to see something of 
the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but 
could only see the swirl and flurry of gun-fire and the 
smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the backwash 
of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and 
wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge 
of a volcano I sat among the slag heaps with gunner 
observers, who were listening at telephones dumped down 
in the fields and connected with artillery brigades and 
field batteries. 

"The Guards are fighting round Fosse 8," said one of 
these observers. 

Through the mist I could see Fosse 8, a flat-topped hill 
of coal-dust. Little gUnting fights were playing about it, 
like confetti shining in the sun. That was German 
shrapnel. Eruptions of red flame and black earth vom- 
ited out of the hill. That was German high explosive. 
For a time on Monday, September 27th, it was the storm- 
center of battle. 

"What's that?" asked an artilleiy staff-officer, with his 



i86 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ear to the field telephone. "What's that? . . . Hullo! 
. . . Are you there ? . . . The Guards have been kicked off 
Fosse 8 Oh, hell!" 

From all parts of the field of battle such whispers came 
to listening men and were passed on to headquarters, 
where other men listened. This brigade was doing pretty 
well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were coun- 
ter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and 
our casualties heavy. "Oh, hell!" said other men. From 
behind the mist came the news of life and death, reveal- 
ing things which no onlooker could see. 

I went closer to see — into the center of the arc of battle, 
up by the Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours 
still lay in heaps. John Buchan was my companion on 
that walk, and together we stood staring over the edge of 
a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray sky, 
loomed the high, steel columns of the "Tower Bridge," 
the mining-works which I had seen before the battle as 
an inaccessible landmark in the German lines. Now they 
were within our lines in the center of Loos, and no longer 
"leering" at us, as an officer once told me they used to 
do when he led his men into communication trenches 
under their observation. 

Behind us now was the turmoil of war — thousands and 
scores of thousands of men moving in steady columns 
forward and backward in the queer, tangled way which 
during a great battle seems to have no purpose or meaning, 
except to the directing brains on the Headquarters Staff, 
and, sometimes in history, none to them. 

Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams 
of mules harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains 
of motor ambulances packed with wounded men, with 
infantry brigades plodding through the slush and slime, 
with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and great 
bivouacs in the boggy fields. 

The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and York- 
shires, and Leinsters, passed and repassed in dense masses, 
in small battalions, in scattered groups. One could tell 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 187 

them from those who were filling their places by the white 
chalk which covered them from head to foot, and some- 
times by the blood which had splashed them. 

Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and 
had fought in attack and counter-attack through those 
days and nights went very silently, and no man cheered 
them. Legions of tall lads, who a few months before 
marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged 
toward the fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy 
packs, with all their smartness befouled by the business 
of war, but wonderful and pitiful to see because of the 
look of courage and the gravity in their eyes as they went 
up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone of 
the enemy's fire the traffic ceased, and I came into the 
desolate lands of death, where there is but little movement, 
and the only noise is that of guns. I passed by ruined 
villages and towns. 

To the left was Vermelles (two months before death 
nearly caught me there), and I stared at those broken 
houses and roofless farms and fallen churches which used 
to make one's soul shiver even when they stood clear in 
the daylight. 

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masin- 
garbe, from which many of our troops marched out to 
begin the great attack. Farther back were the great 
slag heaps of Nceux-les-Mines, and all around other 
black hills of this mining country which rise out of the 
flat plain. It was a long walk through narrow trenches 
toward that Loos redoubt where at last I stood. There 
was the smell of death in those narrow, winding ways. 
One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance- 
way, knelt on the fire-step, with his head bent and his 
forehead against the wet clay, as though in prayer. 
Farther on other bodies of London boys and Scots lay 
huddled up. 

We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the 
enemy's batteries on one side and ours on the other in 
sweeping semicircles. The shells of all these batteries 



i88 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

went crying through the air with high, whining sighs, 
which ended in the cough of death. The roar of the guns 
was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping 
a road to my right, and his shells went overhead with a 
continual rush, passing our shells, which answered back. 
The whole sky was filled with these thunderbolts. Many 
of them were "Jack Johnsons," which raised a volume of 
black smoke where they fell. I wondered how it would 
feel to be caught by one of them, whether one would have 
any consciousness before being scattered. Fear, which 
had walked with me part of the way, left me for a time. 
I had a strange sense of exhilaration, an intoxicated in- 
terest in this foul scene and the activity of that shell-fire. 

Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama 
of the battleground. It was but an ugly, naked plain, 
rising up to Hulluch and Haisnes on the north, falling 
down to Loos on the east, from where we stood, and rising 
again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again), still farther 
east and a little south. 

The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the sky- 
line, and Fosse 8 was a black wart between them. The 
*' Tower Bridge," close by in the town of Loos, was the 
one high landmark which broke the monotony of this 
desolation. 

No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of 
men were hidden about us in the ditches, waiting for 
another counter-attack behind storms of fire. The only 
moving things were the shells which vomited up earth 
and smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over 
the whole zone. We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes 
and Fosse 8 with an intense, concentrated fire, and the 
enemy was retaliating by scattering shells over the town 
of Loos and our new line between Hill 70 and the chalk- 
pit, and the whole length of our line from north to south. 

Only two men moved about above the trenches. They 
were two London boys carrying a gas-cyhnder, and 
whistling as though it were a health resort under the 
autumn sun. ... It was not a health resort. It stank of 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 189 

death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush 
of flesh and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all 
the ground in this neighborhood, and for a long distance 
north. 

Through the streets of Bethune streamed a tide of war: 
the transport of divisions, gun-teams with their limber 
ambulance convoys, ammunition wagons, infantry mov- 
ing up to the front, despatch riders, staff-officers, signalers, 
and a great host of men and mules and motor-cars. The 
rain lashed down upon the crowds; waterproofs and bur- 
berries and the tarpaulin covers of forage-carts streamed 
with water, and the bronzed faces of the soldiers were 
dripping wet. Mud splashed them to the thighs. Foun- 
tains of mud spurted up from the wheels of gun-carriages. 
The chill of winter made Highlanders as well as Indians 
— those poor, brave, wretched Indians who had been 
flung into the holding attack on the canal at La Bassee, 
and mown down in the inevitable way by shrapnel and 
machine-gun bullets — shiver in the wind. 

Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit 
of exultation among many fighting-men. At last there 
was a break in the months of stationary warfare. We 
were up and out of the trenches. The first proofs of vic- 
tory were visible there in a long line of German guns 
captured at Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers 
with fixed bayonets. Men moving up did not know the 
general failure that had swamped a partial success. They 
stared at the guns and said, "By God — we've got *em 
going this time!" 

A group of French civiHans gathered round them, ex- 
cited at the sight. Artillery officers examined their 
broken breech-blocks and their inscriptions: 

"Pro Gloria et P atria.'' 

" Ultima ratio regis.'' 

The irony of the words made some of the onlookers 
laugh. A French interpreter spoke to some English 
officers with a thrill of joy in his voice. Had they heard 



190 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the last news from Champagne? The French had broken 
through the enemy's hne. The Germans were in full re- 
treat. ... It was utterly untrue, because after the desper- 
ate valor of heroic youth and horrible casualties, the 
French attack had broken down. But the spirit of hope 
came down the cold wind and went with the men whom I 
saw marching to the fields of fate in the slanting rain, as 
the darkness and the mist came to end another day of 
battle. 

Outside the headquarters of a British army corps stood 
another line of captured field-guns and several machine- 
guns, of which one had a strange history of adventure. 
It was a Russian machine-gun, taken by the Germans 
on the eastern front and retaken by us on the western 
front. 

In General Rawlinson's heaaquarters I saw a queer 
piece of booty. It was a big bronze bell used by the 
Germans in their trenches to signal a British gas-attack. 

General Rawlinson was taking tea in his chateau when 
I called on him, and was having an animated argument 
with Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards, as to the dis- 
posal of the captured artillery and other trophies. Lord 
Cavan claimed some for his own, with some violence of 
speech. But General Rawlinson was bright and breezy 
as usual. Our losses were not worrying him. As a great 
general he did not allow losses to worry him. He ate his 
tea with a hearty appetite, and chaffed his staff-officers. 
They were anticipating the real German counter-attack — ■ 
a big affair. Away up the line there would be more dead 
piled up, more filth and stench of human slaughter, but 
the smell of it would not reach back to headquarters. 

XIII 

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 
191 5, and issued by the War Office on November ist of 
that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated that: 

"In view of the great length of line along which the 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 191 

British troops were operating i:t was necessary to keep a 
strong reserve in my own hand. The nth Corps, con- 
sisting of the Guards, the 21st and the 24th Divisions, 
were detailed for this purpose. This reserve was the 
more necessary owing to the fact that the Tenth French 
Army had to postpone its attack until one o'clock in the 
day; and further, that the corps operating on the French 
left had to be directed in a more or less southeasterly 
direction, involving, in case of our success, a considerable 
gap in our line. To insure, however, the speedy and 
effective support of the ist and 4th Corps in the case of 
their success, the 21st and 24th Divisions passed the night 
of the 24th and 25th on the line Beuvry (to the east of 
Bethune) — Noeux-les-Mines. The Guards Division was 
in the neighborhood of Tillers on the same night." 

By that statement, and by the facts that happened in 
accordance with it, the whole scheme of attack in the 
battle of Loos will stand challenged in history. Lord 
French admits in that despatch that he held his reserves 
"in his own hand," and later he states that it was not 
until nine-thirty on the morning of battle that "I placed 
the 2ist and 24th Divisions at the disposal of the General 
Officer commanding First Army." He still held the 
Guards. He makes, as a defense of the decision to hold 
back the reserves, the extraordinary statement that there 
"would be a considerable gap in our line in case of our 
success." That is to say, he was actually envisaging a 
gap in the line if the attack succeeded according to his 
expectations, and risking the most frightful catastrophe 
that may befall any army in an assault upon a powerful 
enemy, provided with enormous reserves, as the Germans 
were at that time, and as our Commander-in-Chief ought 
to have known. 

But apart from that the whole time-table of the battle 
was, as it now appears, fatally wrong. To move divisions 
along narrow roads requires an immense amount of time, 
even if the roads are clear, and those roads toward Loos 
were crowded with the transport and gun-limbers of the 



192 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

assaulting troops. To move them in daylight to the 
trenches meant inevitable loss of life and almost certain 
demoralization under the enemy's gun-fire. 

"Between ii a.m. and 12 noon the central brigade of 
these divisions filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les- 
Mines, respectively," wrote Sir John French. It was 
not possible for them to reach our old trenches until 4 
P.M. It was Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, the Chief of 
Staff, who revealed that fact to me afterward in an official 
explanation, and it was confirmed by battalion officers of 
the 24th Division whom I met. 

That time-table led to disaster. By eight o'clock in 
the morning there were Scots on Hill 70. They had been 
told to go "all out," with the promise that the 
ground they gained would be consolidated by following 
troops. Yet no supports were due to arrive until 4 p.m. 
at our original line of attack — still away back from Hill 
70 — by which time the enemy had recovered from his 
first surprise, had reorganized his guns, and was moving 
up his own supports. Tragedy befell the Scots on Hill 
70 and in the Cite St.-Auguste, as I have told. Worse 
tragedy happened to the 21st and 24th Divisions. They 
became hopelessly checked and tangled in the traffic of 
the roads, and in their heavy kit were exhausted long 
before they reached the battlefield. They drank the 
water out of their bottles, and then were parched. They 
ate their iron rations, and then were hungry. Some of 
their transport moved too far forward in daylight, was 
seen by German observers, ranged on by German guns, 
and blown to bits on the road. The cookers were de- 
stroyed, and with them that night's food. None of the 
officers had been told that they were expected to attack 
on that day. All they anticipated was the duty of hold- 
ing the old support trenches. In actual fact they arrived 
when the enemy was preparing a heavy counter-attack 
and flinging over storms of shell-fire. The officers had 
no maps and no orders. They were utterly bewildered 
with the situation, and had no knowledge as to the where- 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 193 

abouts of the enemy or their own objectives. Their men 
met heavy fire for the first time when their physical and 
moral condition was weakened by the long march, the 
lack of food and water, and the unexpected terror ahead 
of them. They crowded into broken trenches, where 
shells burst over them and into them. Young officers 
acting on their own initiative tried to lead their men 
forward, and isolated parties went forward, but uncer- 
tainly, not knowing the ground nor their purpose. 
Shrapnel lashed them, and high-explosive shells plowed 
up the earth about them and with them. Dusk came, 
and then darkness. Some officers were cursing, and some 
wept, fearing dishonor. The men were huddled together 
like sheep without shepherds when wolves are about, and 
saw by the bewilderment of the officers that they were 
without leadership. It is that which makes for demorali- 
zation, and these men, who afterward in the battle of the 
Somme in the following year fought with magnificent 
valor, were on that day at Loos demoralized in a tragic 
and complete way. Those who had gone forward came 
back to the crowded trenches and added to the panic and 
the rage and the anguish. Men smashed their rifles in a 
kind of madness. Boys were cursing and weeping at the 
same time. They were too hopelessly disordered and dis- 
mayed by the lack of guidance and by the shock to their 
sense of discipline to be of much use in th at battle. Some 
bodies of them in both these unhappy divisions arrived in 
front of Hill 70 at the very time when the enemy launched 
his first counter-attack, and were driven back in disorder. 
. . . Some days later I saw the 21st Division marching 
back behind the lines. Rain slashed them. They walked 
with bent heads. The young officers were blanched and had 
a beaten look. The sight of those dejected men was tragic 
and pitiful. 

XIV 

Meanwhile, at 6 p.m. on the evening of the first day of 
battle, the Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I 



194 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

saw them march up, splendid In their height and strength 
and glory of youth, I looked out for the officers I knew, 
yet hoped I should not see them — that man who had 
given a farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our 
billet, that other one who knew he would be wounded, 
those two young brothers who had played cricket on a 
sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but saw only 
columns of men, staring grimly ahead of them, with 
strange, unspeakable thoughts behind their maskHke 
faces. 

It was not until the morning of the 26th that the Com- 
mander-in-Chief "placed them at the disposal of the 
General Officer commanding First Army," and it was on 
the afternoon of Monday, the 27th, that they were or- 
dered to attack. 

By that time we had lost Fosse 8, one brigade of the 
9th Scottish Division having been flung back to its own 
trenches after desperate fighting, at frightful cost, after 
the capture of the Hohenzollern redoubt by the 26th 
Brigade of that division. To the north of them the 7th 
Division was also suff"ering horrible losses after the capt- 
ure of the quarries, near Hulluch, and the village of 
Haisnes, which afterward was lost. The commanding 
officers of both divisions, General Capper of the 7th, and 
General Thesiger of the 9th, were killed as they recon- 
noitered the ground, and wounded men were pouring 
down to the casualty clearing stations if they had the 
luck to get so far. Some of them had not that luck, but 
lay for nearly two days before they were rescued by the 
stretcher-bearers from Quality Street and Philosophe. 

It was bad all along the line. The whole plan had gone 
astray from the beginning. With an optimism which 
was splendid in fighting-men and costly in the High Com- 
mand, our men had attacked positions of enormous 
strength — held by an enemy in the full height of his 
power — without sufficient troops in reserve to follow up 
and support the initial attack, to consohdate the ground, 
and resist inevitable counter-attacks. What reserves the 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 195 

Commander-in-Chief had he held "In his own hand" too 
long and too far back. 

The Guards went in when the enemy was reorganized 
to meet them. The 28th Division, afterward in support, 
was too late to be a decisive factor. 

I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame 
him, as I am not a soldier nor a military expert. He did 
his best, with the highest motives. The blunders he 
made v/ere due to ignorance of modern battles. Many 
other generals made many other blunders, and our men 
paid with their lives. Our High Command had to learn 
by mistakes, by ghastly mistakes, repeated often, until 
they became visible to the military mind and were paid 
for again by the slaughter of British youth. One does 
not blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and 
recorder, like myself, does not sit in judgment. He has 
no right to judge. He merely cries out, "O God! . . . 
O God!" in remembrance of all that agony and that waste 
of splendid boys who loved life, and died. 

On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of 
danger. The Scots of the 15th Division, weakened by 
many losses and exhausted by their long fatigue, had been 
forced to abandon the important position of Puits 14'''^ 
— a mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in 
defense with the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side 
of Hill 70. The Germans had been given time to bring 
up their reserves, to reorganize their broken lines, and to 
get their batteries into action again. 

There was a consultation of anxious brigadiers in Loos 
when no man could find safe shelter owing to the heavy 
shelling which now ravaged among the houses. Rations 
were running short, and rain fell through the roofless 
ruins, and ofiicers and men shivered in wet clothes. Dead 
bodies blown into bits, headless trunks, pools of blood, 
made a ghastly mess in the roadways and the houses. 
Badly wounded men were dragged down into the cellars, 
and lay there in the filth of Friday's fighting. The head- 
quarters of one of the London brigades had put up in a 



196 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

roofless bam, but were shelled out, and settled down on 
some heaps of brick in the open. It was as cold as death 
in the night, and no fire could be lighted, and iron rations 
were the only food, until two chaplains, "R. C." and 
Church of England (no difference of dogma then), came 
up as volunteers in a perilous adventure, with bottles of 
hot soup in mackintoshes. They brought a touch of 
human warmth to the brigade staff, made those hours of 
the night more endurable, but the men farther forward 
had no such luck. They were famishing and soaked, in 
a cold hell where shells tossed up the earth about them and 
spattered them with the blood and flesh of their comrades. 

On Monday morning the situation was still more criti- 
cal, all along the line, and the Guards were ordered up to 
attack Hill 70, to which only a few Scots were clinging 
on the near slopes. The 6th Cavalry Brigade dismounted 
■ — no more dreams of exploiting success and galloping 
round Lens — ^were sent into Loos with orders to hold the 
village at all cost, with the men of the 15th Division, who 
had been left there. 

The Londoners were still holding on to the chalk-pit 
south of Loos, under murderous fire. 

It was a bad position for the troops sent into action at 
that stage. The result of the battle on September 25th 
had been to create a salient thrust like a wedge into the 
German position and enfiladed by their guns. The sides 
of the salient ran sharply back — from Hulluch in the 
north, past the chalk-quarries to Givenchy, and in the 
south from the lower slopes of Hill 70 past the Double 
Grassier to Grenay. The orders given to the Guards 
were to straighten out this salient on the north by capt- 
uring the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14'''', to the north of 
it, and the chalk-pit still farther north. 

It was the 2d Brigade of Guards, including Grenadiers, 
Welsh and Scots Guards, which was to lead the assault, 
while the 1st Brigade on the left maintained a holding 
position and the 3d Brigade was in support, immediately 
behind. 



THE NATURF TTLE 197 

As soon as the Guards started to attack they were met 
by a heavy storm of gas-shells. This checked them for 
a time, as smoke-helmets — the old-fashioned things of 
flannel which were afterward changed for the masks with 
nozles — had to be served out, and already men were 
choking and gasping in the poisonous fumes. Among 
them was the colonel of the Grenadiers, whose command 
was taken over by the major. Soon the men advanced 
again, looking like devils, as, in artillery formation (small 
separate groups), they groped their way through the poi- 
soned clouds. Shrapnel and high explosives burst over 
them and among them, and many men fell as they came 
within close range of the enemy's positions running from 
Hill 70 northward to the chalk-pit. 

The Irish Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, 
advanced down the valley beyond Loos and gained the 
lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the chalk-pit, while the 
Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14*''^ and the building in 
its group of houses known as the Keep. Another body 
of Guards, including Grenadiers and Welsh, attacked at 
the same time the lower slopes of Hill 70. 

Puits 14^'^ itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, 
led by an officer named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged 
in hand-to-hand fighting, routing out the enemy from 
the houses. Some companies of the Grenadiers came to 
the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards, but 
suffered heavy losses themselves. A platoon under a 
young lieutenant named Ayres Ritchie reached the Puits, 
and, storming their way into the Keep, knocked out a 
machine-gun, mounted on the second floor, by a desperate 
bombing attack. The officer held on in a most dauntless 
way to the position, until almost every man was either 
killed or wounded, unable to receive support, owing to 
the enfilade fire of the German machine-guns. 

Night had now come on, the sky lightened by the 

bursting of shells and flares, and terrible in its tumult of 

battle. Some of the Coldstreamers had gained possession 

of the chalk-pit, which they were organizing into a strong 
14 



198 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

defensive position, and various companies of the Guards 
divisions, after heroic assaults upon Hill 70, where they 
were shattered by the lire which met them on the crest 
from the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side, had dug 
themselves into the lower slopes. 

There was a strange visitor that day at the headquar- 
ters of the Guards division, where Lord Cavan was direct- 
ing operations. A young officer came in and said, quite 
calmly: "Sir, I have to report that my battalion has been 
cut to pieces. We have been utterly destroyed." 

Lord Cavan questioned him, and then sent for another 
officer. "Look after that young man," he said, quietly. 
"He is mad. It is a case of shell-shock." 

Reports came through of a mysterious officer going 
the round of the batteries, saying that the Germans had 
broken through and that they had better retire. Two 
batteries did actually move away. 

Another unknown officer called out, "Retire! Retire!" 
until he was shot through the head. "German spies!" 
said some of our officers and men, but the Intelligence 
branch said, "Not spies . . . madmen . . . poor devils!" 

Before the dawn came the Coldstreamers made another 
desperate attempt to attack and hold Puits 14'''^ but 
the position was too deadly even for their height of valor, 
and although some men pushed on into this raging fire, 
the survivors had to fall back to the woods, where they 
strengthened their defensive works. 

On the following day the position was the same, the 
sufferings of our men being still further increased by 
heavy shelling from 8-inch howitzers. Colonel Egerton 
of the Coldstream Guards and his adjutant were killed 
in the chalk-pit. 

It was now seen by the headquarters staff of the Guards 
Division that Puits 14^^^ was untenable, owing to its 
enfilading by heavy artillery, and the order was given for 
a retirement to the chalk-pit, which was a place of sanct- 
uary owing to the wonderful work done throughout the 
night to strengthen its natural defensive features by sand- 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 199 

bags and barbed wire, in spite of machine-guns which raked 
it from the neighboring woods. 

The retirement was done as though the men were on 
parade, slowly, and in perfect order, across the field of 
fire, each man bearing himself, so their officers told me, 
as though at the Trooping of the Colors, until now one 
and then another fell in a huddled heap. It was an 
astonishing tribute to the strength of tradition among 
troops. To safeguard the honor of a famous name these 
men showed such dignity in the presence of death that 
even the enemy must have been moved to admiration. 

But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and 
the Commander-in-Chief had to call upon the French for 
help, realizing that without strong assistance the salient 
made by that battle of Loos would be a death-trap. The 
French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus failing 
to give the British troops protection on their right flank. 

"On representing this to General Joffre," wrote Sir 
John French, "he was kind enough to ask the commander 
of the northern group of French armies to render us 
assistance. General Foch met those demands in the same 
friendly spirit which he has always displayed throughout 
the course of the whole campaign, and expressed his 
readiness to give me all the support he could. On the 
morning of the 28th we discussed the situation, and the 
general agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take over 
the ground occupied by us, extending from the French 
left up to and including that portion of Hill 70 which we 
were holding, and also the village of Loos. This relief 
was commenced on September 30th, and completed on 
the two following nights." 

So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent coun- 
ter-attack delivered on October 8th all along the line 
from Fosse 8 on the north to the right of the French 9th 
Corps on the south, with tM^enty-eight battalions in the 
first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous 
bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 
1st Division in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and 



200 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

upon the Guards holding the Hohenzollern redoubt near 
Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had been 
sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the 
living were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved 
up into chunks of flesh in the chaos of broken trenches. 
The Germans had their own shambles, more frightful, 
we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in 
front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed 
back and waves of living men were broken by the fire 
of our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir John 
French's staff" estimated the number of German dead as 
from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make 
any accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and 
always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of 
the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made 
corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping. 

What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not 
Lens, nor Lille, nor even Hill 70 (for our line had to be 
withdrawn from those bloody slopes where our men left 
many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient 
enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foot- 
hold on one slag heap of the Double Grassier, where our 
men lived, if they could, a few yards from Germans on 
the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern redoubt 
which became another Hooge where English youth was 
blown up by mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned 
to a living death in lousy caves dug into the chalk. An- 
other V-shaped salient, narrower than that of Ypres, more 
dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black 
dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country 
beyond Loos. 

The battle which had been begun with such high hopes 
ended in ghastly failure by ourselves and by the French. 
Men who came back from it spoke in whispers of its gen- 
eralship and staff" work, and said things which were dan- 
gerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men, 
asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of 
the soldiers they led should be thrown away in such a 



THE NATURE OF A BATTLE 201 

muck of slaughter, laughing with despairing mirth at the 
optimism of their leaders, who had been lured on by a 
strange, false, terrible belief in German weakness, and 
looking ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as 
this which would lead only to other salients, after des- 
perate and futile endeavor. 



Part Four 

A WINTER OF 
DISCONTENT 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 



THE winter of 191 5 was, I think, the worst of all. 
There was a settled hopelessness in it which was 
heavy in the hearts of men — ours and the enemy's. In 
1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies 
of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this 
city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but 
the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men 
believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each 
side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 
1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme 
after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and 
staggered the soul of the world by the immense martyr- 
dom of boys — British, French, and German — on the 
western front. But the German retreat from the Somme 
to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite 
to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack 
and counter-attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. 
There was at best the mirage of something like victory 
on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the 
Germans had weakened and were nearly spent. 

But for a time in those dark days of 191 5 there was no 
hope ahead. No mental dope by which our fighting-men 
could drug themselves into seeing a vision of the war's 
end. 

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres 
in the ground we had gained — the new horror of that new 
salient — had sapped into the confidence of those battalion 
officers and men who had been assured of German weak- 
ness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It 
was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've 



2o6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

got 'em beat!" when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern 
redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bom- 
bardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack 
they made by the orders of a High Command which be- 
lieved in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, 
was only "asking for trouble" from German counter- 
attacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poi- 
son-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness 
which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without 
definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of 
death. 

"It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men," said the 
generals. *'We must maintain an aggressive policy." 

They searched their trench maps for good spots where 
another "small operation" might be organized. There 
was a competition among the corps and divisional gen- 
erals as to the highest number of raids, mine explosions, 
trench-grabbings undertaken by their men. 

"My corps," one old general told me over a cup of tea 
in his headquarters mess, "beats the record for raids." 
His casualties also beat the record, and many of his oflicers 
and men called him, just bluntly and simply, "Our old 
murderer." They disliked the necessity of dying so that 
he might add one more raid to his heroic competition 
with the corps commander of the sector on the left. 
When they waited for the explosion of a mine which after- 
ward they had to "rush" in a race with the German 
bom.bing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the pro- 
ceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms 
torn ofi^ by German stick-bombs or shells. "What's the 
good of it?" they asked, and could find no answer except 
the satisfaction of an old man listening to the distant 
roar of the new tumult by which he had "raised hell" 
again. 

n 

The autumn of 191 5 was wet in Flanders and Artois, 
where our men settled down — knee-deep where the 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 207 

trenches were worst — for the winter campaign. On 
rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the 
Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain 
into the faces of men marching through mud to the fight- 
ing-Hnes and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps 
of trenches into which water came trickhng down the 
slimy parapets. 

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog 
crept out of the ground, so that rifles were clammy to 
the touch and a blanket of moisture settled on every 
stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be seen through 
the veil of vapor to the enemy's lines, where he stayed 
invisible. 

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the 
battlefields were in that quagmire state. An advancing 
wave of men would have been clogged in the mud after 
the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and to advance 
artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done 
on either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those 
trench-raids and minings which had no object except 
*'to keep up the spirit of the men." There was always 
work to do in the trenches — draining them, strengthening 
their parapets, making their walls, tiling or boarding their 
floorways, timbering the dugouts, and after it was done 
another rainstorm or snowstorm undid most of it, and 
the parapets slid down, the water poured in, and spaces 
were opened for German machine-gun fire, and there 
was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which mixed 
with the raindrops, and high explosives which smashed 
through the mud. The working parties had a bad time 
and a wet one, in spite of waders and gum boots which 
were served out to lucky ones. Some of them wore a 
new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with 
guffaws — the *'tin" hat which later became the head- 
gear of all fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, 
but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty 
lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there 
was "Nothing to report,'* 



2oS NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their 
trenches and wet in their dugouts. They slept in soaking 
clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain 
with their tea, and ate mud with their *' bully," and en- 
dured it all with the philosophy of "grin and bear it!" 
and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places 
between explosive curses. 

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were 
more miserable, not because their plight was worse, but 
because I think they lacked the English sense of humor. 
In some places they had the advantage of our men in 
better trenches, with better drains and dugouts — due to 
an industry with which ours could never compete. Here 
and there, as in the ground to the north of Hooge, they 
were in a worse state, with such rivers in their trenches 
that they went to enormous trouble to drain the Belle- 
warde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. 
Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of 
Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where 
the lines were close together — only a few yards apart — 
our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud 
with sucking, gurgling noises. 

"They're drinking soup again!" said our humorists. 

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one 
another, out of their common misery. 

"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier. 

His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which 
divided the enemy and ourselves in a communication 
trench between the main lines. 

"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, 
who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin. 

"So.? . . . You are lucky fellows. We are up to our 
belts in it." 

It was so bad in parts of the line during November 
storms that whole sections of trench collapsed into a 
chaos of slime and ooze. It was the frost as well as the 
rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks sink 
under their weight of sand-bags. German and English 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 209 

soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned 
from their nests by a minor landslide. They ignored 
one another. They pretended that the other fellows were 
not there. They had not been properly introduced. In 
another place, reckless because of their discomfort, the 
Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on 
top to dry their legs, and shouted : " Don't shoot ! Don't 
shoot!" 

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets 
drying their legs, and grinning at the gray ants yonder, 
until these incidents were reported back to G. H. Q. — 
where good jfires were burning under dry roofs — and 
stringent orders came against "fraternization." Every 
German who showed himself was to be shot. Of course 
any Englishman who showed himself — owing to a parapet 
falling in — ^would be shot, too. It was six of one and half 
a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, 
but the dignity of G. H. Q. would not be outraged by 
the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and 
Germans refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of 
the men obeyed orders, and when a German sat up and 
said, "Don't shoot!" plugged him through the head. 
Others were extremely short-sighted. . . . Now and again 
Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly 
to be taken prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke 
with them. 

"There is no sense in this war," said one of them. "It 
is misery on both sides. There is no use in it." 

That thought of war's futility inspired an episode which 
was narrated throughout the army in that winter of '15, 
and led to curious conversations in dugouts and billets. 
Above a German front-line trench appeared a plank on 
which, in big letters, was scrawled these words : 

"The English are fools." 

"Not such bloody fools as all that!" said a sergeant, 
and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters 
by rifle-fire. 

Another plank appeared, with other words: 



210 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"The French are fools." 

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board. 

A third plank was put up : 

"We're all fools. Let's all go home." 

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message 
caused some laughter, and men repeating it said : "There's 
a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on ? 
V/hat's it all about.? Let the old men who made this war 
come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The 
fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We 
all want to go home to our wives and our work." 

Biit neither side was prepared to "go home" first. 
Each side was in a trap — a devil's trap from which there 
was no escape. Loyalty to their, own side, discipline, 
with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old 
tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste 
which ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda 
handed out by pastors, newspapers, generals, staff-officers, 
old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a deep 
and simple love for England and Germany, pride of man- 
hood, fear of cowardice — a thousand complexities of 
thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, 
from breaking the net of fate in which they were en- 
tangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing 
massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, 
"We're all fools! . . . Let's all go home!" 

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, 
too. As an army and a nation they went on to the Peace 
of Brest-Litovsk and their doom. But many German 
soldiers were converted to that gospel of "We're all 
fools!" and would not fight again with any spirit, as we 
found at times, after August 8th, in the last year of war. 

Ill 

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. 
I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. 
Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 211 

it was called *' trench-foot." Many men standing in 
slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost 
all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so 
cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go "dead," and 
then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot 
pokers. When the "reliefs" went up scores of men could 
not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be 
carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dress- 
ing stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the 
winter dragged on, thousands. The medical oflScers cut 
off their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had 
become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting 
feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round 
with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the 
name of that new disease — "trench-foot." Those medi- 
cal officers looked serious as the number of cases increased. 

"This is getting beyond a joke," they said. "It is 
pulling down the battalion strength worse than wounds." 

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and 
cursed the new affliction of their men. Some of them 
said it was due to damned carelessness, others were in- 
clined to think it due to deliberate malingering at a time 
when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds by 
men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out 
of the trenches. 

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those 
boys who were being carried pick-a-back to the ambu- 
lance-trains at Remy siding, near Poperinghe, with both 
feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-wool. 
The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burn- 
ing fagots for conscience' sake. In one battalion of the 
49th (West Riding) Division there were over four hundred 
cases in that winter of '15. Other battalions in the Ypres 
salient suffered as much. 

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was 
taken up to the trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, 
two or three times a day, that the malady of trench-foot 
was reduced, and at last almost eliminated. 



212 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, 
resisted it, and would not be beaten by it. 

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly 
wounded as he stood thigh-high in water. A bomb or a 
trench-mortar smashed one of his legs into a pulp of 
bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down 
to the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed 
to the neck in mud, with his instruments held high. The 
operation was done in the water, red with the blood of 
the wounded man, who was then brought down, less a leg, 
to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man 
about to die. . . . But that evening he chattered cheerfully, 
joked with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote 
a letter to his wife. 

"I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me," 
he began. He mentioned that he had had an "accident" 
which had taken one of his legs away. " But the young- 
sters will like to play with my wooden peg," he wrote, 
and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed 
marveled at him, though day after day they saw great 
courage; such courage as that of another man who was 
brought in mortally wounded and lay next to a comrade 
on the operating table, 

"Stick it, lad!" he said, "stick it!" and turned his head 
a little to look at his friend. 

MdUy of our camps were hardly better than the 
trenches. Only by duck-boards could one walk about 
the morass in which huts were built and tents were 
pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to 
groom their horses, and floundered about in their gum 
boots, cursing the mud which clogged bits and chains and 
bridles, and could find no comfort anywhere between 
Dickebusch and Locre. 

IV 

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by 
the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not 
be held then under concentrated gun-fire from German 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 213 

batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed 
them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a 
communication trench (on the southeast side of the 
earthworks) nicknamed "Big Willie," near another trench 
called "Little Willie.'* Our enemies forced their way 
back into some of their old trenches in this outpost be- 
yond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced 
by our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag 
barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug themselves 
into this graveyard where their dead and ours were 
strewn. 

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should 
covet possession of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good 
military reason beyond the spell of a high-sounding name. 
I went up there one day when it was partly ours and 
stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench para- 
pets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue 
sky, and failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value 
in it — so close to the German Hnes that one could not 
cough for fear of losing one's head. It seemed to me a 
place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a gen- 
eral (appalHng thought!) I should have said: "Let the 
enemy have that little hell of hu. Let men live there 
among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and the stench" 
of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, a^d for 
him will be an abomination, dreaded by his men." 

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that 
the enemy should have crawled back to it after our men 
had been there. They decided to "bite it off," that 
blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line. It was 
an operation that would be good to report in the official 
communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the 
morale of our men after their dead had been buried and 
their wounded patched up and their losses forgotten. 

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of 
assault was given on October 13th, and into the trenches 
went the lace-makers of Nottingham, and the potters of 
the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of Leicester, North 



214 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

StafFordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters, 
on the night of the 12th. 

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a 
tremendous fire upon the redoubt, followed at i p.m. by 
volumes of smoke and gas. The chief features on this 
part of the German Hne were, on the right, a group of 
colliers' houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag 
heap known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger 
dump called Fosse 8, and on the left another group of 
cottages, and another black hillock farther to the right 
of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of the 
Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack. 

It was not an easy task. It was helHsh. Intense as 
our artillery fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy's 
barbed wire and front trenches sufficiently to clear the 
way, and the Germans were still working their machine- 
guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire lifted, and 
the gas-clouds rolled away. 

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, 
October 13th, and the beginning of the attack from a 
slag heap close to some of our heavy guns. It was a fine, 
clear day, and some of the French miners living round the 
pit-heads on our side of the battle Hne climbed up iron 
ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the 
spectacle of war which had become a monotonous and 
familiar thing in their lives, because the intensity of our 
gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a certain 
strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines 
toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by 
the daily din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the 
usual flight of shells in their part of the war zone. 

**The English are attacking again!" was the message 
which brought out these men still living among ruined 
cottages on the edge of the slaughter-fields. They stared 
into the mist, where, beyond the brightness of the autumn 
sun, men were about to fight and die. It was the same 
scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos 
redoubt in the September battle — a flat, bare, black 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 215 

plain, crisscrossed with the whitish earth of the trenches 
rising a Httle toward Loos and then faUing again so that 
in the village there only the Tower Bridge was visible, 
with its steel girders ghnting, high over the horizon line. 
To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying 
clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses 
far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Ho- 
henzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible 
through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor. 

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny 
under the golden light of the autumn sun, and the broken 
towers of village churches, red roofs shattered by shell- 
fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before the wind of 
autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines 
against the gray-blue of the sky. 

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those 
batteries which were massed over a wide stretch of coun- 
try could be located before the battle by a searching 
glass. But v/hen the bombardment began it seemed as 
though our shells came from every field and village for 
miles back, behind the lines. 

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the 
smoke of their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like 
the sparkle of innumerable mirrors heliographing messages 
of death. There was one incessant roar rising and falling 
in waves of prodigious sound. The whole line of battle 
was in a grayish murk, which obscured all landmarks, so 
that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible. 

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new 
clouds rising from the ground and spreading upward in 
a great dense curtain of a fleecy texture. They came 
from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry 
attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another 
wave of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to 
the ground and then curled forward to the enemy's lines. 

"That's our gas!" said a voice on one of the slag heaps, 
amid a group of observers — English and French officers. 

"And the wind is dead right for it," said another voice. 



2i6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

**The Germans will get a taste of it this time!" 

Then there was silence, and some of those observers 
held their breath as though that gas had caught their 
own throats and choked them a little. They tried to 
pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind 
its curtain — men caught in those fumes, the terror- 
stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the 
enemy trapped in their dugouts. Imagination leaped out, 
through invisibility, to the realization of the things that 
were happening beyond. 

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses 
of the human element in this scene of impersonal powers 
and secret forces. Across a stretch of flat ground beyond 
some of those zigzag lines of trenches little black things 
were scurrying forward. They were not bunched to- 
gether in close groups, but scattered. Some of them 
seemed to hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they 
fell, others hurrying on until they disappeared in the 
drifting clouds. 

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by 
the bombers. The Germans were firing tempests of 
shells. Some of them were curiously colored, of a pinkish 
hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green. They 
were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the 
chemistry of death was poured out on both sides — and 
through it went the men of the Midland Division. 

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of 
Staffordshire men, who advanced in four lines toward 
the Big Willie trench which formed the southeast side of 
the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who 
were first over our own parapets, m.ade a quick rush, 
half blinded by the smoke and the gaseous vapors which 
filled the air, and were at once received by a deadly fire 
from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks, and 
men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung 
out in extended order. 

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and 
as they fell cheered their men on, while others ran forward 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 217 

shouting, followed by numbers which dwindled at every 
yard, so that only a few reached the Big WiUie trench in 
the first assault. 

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared 
thirty yards of the trench by the rapidity with which 
they flung their hand-grenades at the German bombers 
who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again' 
they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed 
up the communication trenches, by a series of explosions 
which blew many of them to bits as bomb after bomb 
was hurled into their mass. Other Germans follov/ed, 
flinging their own stick-bombs. 

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man 
was wounded and many were killed. Even then they 
retreated yard by yard, still flinging grenades almost 
with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each 
motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel 
pomegranates which burst with the noise of a high- 
explosive shell. 

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade 
made in the Big Willie trench by some of their men 
behind. Behind them again was another barrier, in case 
the first should be rushed. 

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Ger- 
mans were swarming up Big Willie with strong bombing- 
parties, and would soon blast a way through unless they 
were thrust beyond the range of hand-grenades. It was 
a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South 
Staffordshire men, who went forward to meet this attack 
and kept the enemy back until four o'clock in the after- 
noon, when only a few living men stood among the dead 
and they had to fall back to the second barrier. 

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the 
trenches, and in the darkness the wounded men were 
carried back to the rear, while those who had escaped 
worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sand-bags 
and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life 
lay in fierce industry. 



2i8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Early next morning an attempt was made by other 
battalions to come to the relief of those who held on 
behind those barriers in Big Willie trench. They were 
Nottingham men — Robin Hoods and other Sherwood 
lads — and they came across the open ground in two direc- 
tions, attacking the west as well as the east ends of the 
German communication trenches which formed the face 
of the Hohenzollern redoubt. 

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their 
advance was met by intense fire from artillery and 
machine-guns, so that many were blown to bits or man- 
gled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in 
Big Willie trench. 

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fight- 
ing like this on the right, another brigade had been en- 
gaged on the left. It contained Sherwood, Leicester, and 
Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October 13th, went 
forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor. 
Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were suc- 
cessful in reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed 
through the barbed wire, part of which was uncut, and 
reached the Fosse trench which forms the north base of 
the salient. 

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely 
and the two remaining lines were heavily shelled by Ger- 
man artillery. It was an hour in which the courage of 
those men was agonized. They were exposed on naked 
ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with 
gas and smoke; all the abomination of battle — the moan- 
ing of the wounded, the last cries of the dying, the death- 
crawl of stricken beings holding their broken limbs and 
their entrails — ^was around them, and in front a hidden 
enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better 
position. 

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leices- 
tershire were sustained in that shambles by the spirit 
that had come to them through the old yeoman stock in 
which their traditions were rooted, and those who had 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 219 

not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, 
past these poor, bloody, moaning men, to the German 
trenches behind the redoubt. 

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, 
and while their bombers were at work some of the Lin- 
colns pushed up with a machine-gun to a point within 
sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed till 
dark, and then were forced to fall back. 

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force 
their way up the Little Willie trench on the extreme left 
of the redoubt, and here ghastly fighting took place. 
Some of the Leicesters made a dash three hundred yards 
up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering 
numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again 
and again other Midland lads went up that alleyway of 
death, flinging their grenades until they fell or until few 
comrades were left to support them as they stood among 
their dead and dying. 

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there 
was no strength in their arms to hurl another bomb, or 
until death came to them. Yet the business went on 
through the darkness of the afternoon, and into the 
deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by 
the white illumination of German flares and by the flash 
of bursting shells. 

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the re- 
doubt still beat a tattoo like the ruflle of war-drums, and 
from behind the barriers in the Big Willie trench came 
the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull explosions of 
other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed 
that night. 

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh 
companies of Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, 
mixed up confusedly with comrades from other companies, 
wounded or spent with fighting, but determined to hold 
the ground they had won. 

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were 
holding out desperately and almost at the last gasp, when 



^2o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

they were relieved by other Sherwoods, and it was here 
that a young officer named Vickers was found in the 
way that won him his V. C. 

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against 
a horde of men eager for his death, eager to get at the 
men behind him. But they could not approach. He 
and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear 
before them, and any man who flung himself forward was 
the target of a hand-grenade. 

From front and from flank German bombs came whizz- 
ing, falling short sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore 
down lumps of trench, and sometimes falling very close 
— close enough to kill. 

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the 
barrier still intact by bombing and bombing. 

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he 
wondered how long the barrier would last, and gave 
orders for another to be built behind him, so that when the 
rush came it would be stopped behind him — and over him. 

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, 
and as it was built that young lieutenant knew that his 
own retreat was being cut off" and that he was being 
coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with 
him — I never learned their names — and they were hardly 
enough to hand up bombs as quickly as he wished to throw 
them. 

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting 
for a pounce. Though wounded so that he felt faint 
and giddy, he called out for more bombs. "More!" he 
said, "More!" and his hand was like a machine reach- 
ing out and throwing. 

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was 
hauled over the barricade which he had ordered to be 
built behind him, closing up his way of escape. 

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th 
Division held on to their ground, and some of the Sher- 
v\/^oods made a new attack, clearing the enemy out of the 
east portion of the redoubt. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 221 

It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack 
made by the enemy at a different point, because it reheved 
the pressure there. Bom^bing duels continued hour after 
hour, and human nature could hardly have endured so 
long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of 
men. 

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on 
the night of October 15th the enemy attacked along the 
whole line of redoubts, and the Midland men,who were just 
about to leave the trenches, found themselves engaged in 
a new action. They had to fight again before they could 
go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their 
right of way and home, and bombed the enemy back to 
his holes in the ground. 

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Mid- 
land men of England, whose division, years later, helped 
to break the Hindenburg line along the great canal south 
of St.-Quentin. 

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless 
the generals who planned it hold the secret. It cost a 
heavy price in life and agony. It demonstrated the fight- 
ing spirit of many English boys who did the best they 
could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great 
courage, before they died or fell, and it left some living 
men, and others who relieved them in Big Willie and 
Little Willie trenches, so close to the enemy that one 
could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers. 

And through the winter of '15, and the years that fol- 
lowed, the Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, 
as horrible as Hooge, as deadly, as damnable in its filthy 
perils, where men of English blood, and Irish, and Scot- 
tish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted them- 
selves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose 
walls stank of new and ancient death. 

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the 
Hohenzollern were the men of the 12th Division, New 
Army men, and all of the old stock and spirit of England, 



222 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester and 
Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex 
(which meant London), as the names of their battalions 
told. In September they relieved the Guards and cav- 
alry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, 
and in February they began a long spell at the Hohen- 
zollern. It was there the English battalions learned the 
worst things of war and showed the quality of English 
courage. 

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, 
was marvelous in spirit, stronger than the flesh. 

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his 
company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing- 
party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center 
of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went 
back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs. 

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close 
below the knee and he was wounded in both arms. By 
a kind of miracle — the miracle of human courage — he 
did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench, mud 
so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk — 
but made his way along fifty yards of trench toward the 
crater where his comrades were hard pressed. He came 
up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with 
his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to 
him and directed him to bomb six feet toward where help 
was most needed, and worked his way forward to the 
crater where the Germans had developed a violent 
counter-attack. 

Men fell rapidly under the enemy's bomb-fire, but 
Cotter, with only one leg, and bleeding from both arms, 
steadied his comrades, who were beginning to have the 
wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled the fire, 
and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was 
repulsed after two hours' fighting, and only then did 
Cotter allow his wounds to be bandaged. From the dug- 
out where he lay while the bombardment still continued 
he called out cheery words to the men, until he was car- 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 223 

ried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V. C, 
but died of his wounds. 

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for 
honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, 
and in the mud, and the fumes of shells, and rain-swept 
darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and 
place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, 
did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of 
these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. 
Lea Smith, of the BuflPs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, 
helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce 
attack by German bombers until it jammed. 

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that 
single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm 
bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements 
reached him. 

Another officer of the Buffs — by name Smeltzer — with- 
drew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was 
wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the 
enemy from following up. The men were proud of his 
gallantry, but when, he was asked what he had done he 
could think of nothing except that "when the Boches 
began shelling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped 
I came out again." 

There were many men like that who did amazing 
things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. 
Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the 
West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he 
met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through 
his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and 
then went back to lead his men, and remained with them 
until the German night attack was repulsed. He was 
again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble 
the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of 
March i8th and 19th), and trudged back alone. 

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The 
honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of 
trench warfare — one V. C, sixteen D. S. C.'s, forty-five 



224 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals — were won 
by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand 
men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that 
time, made up by new drafts, was lOO per cent.; and the 
Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs. 



I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 
191 5, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in 
each of my top-boots, among a company of men who 
were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a 
friend of mine raised his hand and said, "Listen!'* 

Through the open door came the music of a mouth- 
organ, and it was playing an old tune : 

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. 

Let nothing you dismay. 
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, 

Was born on Christmas Day. 

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a 
doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence 
which rattled the window-panes, and beyond the booming 
of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant 
guns. 

"*' Christmas Eve!" said an officer. "Nineteen hundred 
and fifteen years ago . . . and now — this!" 

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a 
funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And 
so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every 
dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the 
meaning of the day, with its message of peace and good- 
will, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the 
war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after 
that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone since last 
Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage 
of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, 
the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 225 

trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been 
busy — and where the spirit of evil lay in ambush! 

So it was when I went through Armentieres within 
easy range of the enemy's guns. Already six hundred 
civilians — mostly women and children — had been killed 
there. But, still, other women were chatting together 
through broken window-panes, and children were staring 
into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs 
and shell-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on 
sale. 

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots — a French 
Hop o' My Thumb in the giant's boots — was gazing wist- 
fully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real 
soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christ- 
mas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools 
for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a 
dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed 
at them: "My heart is to you." "Good luck." "To 
the success!" "Remind France." 

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with 
French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy 
of the sentiment upon which he was spending it. 

"The people at home will be glad of 'em," he said. 
"I s'pose one can't forget Christmas altogether. Though 
it ain't the same thing out here." 

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded 
countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, 
with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a 
road that had become a river-bed, fountains of spray 
rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars 
lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders 
side-slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply- 
columns churning up deep ruts. 

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If 
Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those 
grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard 
must have lifted his red gown high — ^waist-high — v/hen 
he waded up some of the communication trenches to the 



226 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, 
now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other 
slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as 
I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sand- 
bags to save a headlong plunge into icy water. 

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the 
laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and 
make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets 
and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those 
sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead 
ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred 
ruins on the edge of the enemy's lines. 

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches 
less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind 
rifles and waiting to kill. 

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desola- 
tion of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I 
stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, 
when the officer who was with me said, "It's best to get 
a move on here," and, "This road is swept by machine- 
gun fire," and, "I don't like this corner; it's quite 
unhealthy." 

But that absurd idea — of Santa Claus in the trenches — 
came into my head several times, and I wondered whether 
the Geqjnans would fire a whizz-bang at him or give a 
burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of his 
red cloak. 

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front- 
line trench a small group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing 
one another. 

"Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?" 
asked a lad, grinning down at an enormous pair of waders 
belonging to a comrade. 

"Likely, ain't it .? " said the other boy. " Father Christ- 
mas would be a bloody fool to come out here. . . . They'd 
be full of water in the morning." 

"You'll get some presents," I said. "They haven't 
forgotten you at home." 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 227 

At that -word "home" the boy flushed and something 
went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel 
helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girHsh-looking 
fellow — perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing 
him — and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him 
yearn back to some village in Yorkshire. 

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the 
idea of Christmas with contemptuous irony. 

"A happy Christmas!" said one of them, with a laugh. 
** Plenty of crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain't 
in it." 

"And I hope we're going to give the Boches some 
Christmas presents," said another. "They deserve it, I 
don't think!" 

"No truce this year,?" I asked. 

"A truce? . . . We're not going to allow any monkey- 
tricks on the parapets. To hell with Christmas charity 
and all that tosh. We've got to get on with the war. 
That's my motto." 

Other men said: "We wouldn't mind a holiday. 
We're fed up to the neck with all this muck.'* 

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, 
and the only carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, 
deep chant of the guns on both sides, and the shrill soprano 
of whisthng shells, and the rattle on the keyboards of 
machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into 
a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some 
shrapnel shells were bursting, and behind the lines our 
"heavies" were busily at work firing at long range. 

"On earth peace, good-will toward men." 

The message was spoken at many a little service on 
both sides of that long line where great armies were in- 
trenched with their death-machines, and the riddle of 
life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which 
came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the rever- 
beration of great guns. 

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in 
their waders, and the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted. 



228 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

not by angelic songs, but by the splutter of rifle-bullets 
all along the line. 

VI 

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of 
the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage 
violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day 
of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was no 
peace on earth. 

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to 
another year of wan I heard the New- Year's chorus 
when I went to see the last of the year across the battle- 
fields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went 
into the tomb of the past, w ith all its tragic memories, to 
thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The 
"heavies" were indulging in a special strafe this New- 
Year's eve. As I went down a road near the lines by 
Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun 
upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of 
shells, and the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's 
sense of sound. All about me in the village of Annequin, 
through which I walked, there was no other sound, no 
noise of human life. There were no New- Year's eve re- 
joicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge 
of the battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses 
were blown to pieces, and when here and there through 
a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's white face peer- 
ing out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen 
a ghost-face in some black pit of hell. 

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives 
and always under the fire of German guns. That any 
human being should be there passed all belief. From a 
shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of battle, 
where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of 
Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. 
Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black 
ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies 
lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hul- 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 229 

luch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New- 
Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound 
of it, but stared at the broad desolation and listened to 
the enormous clangor of great guns. 

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some 
very human life. It was a big party of bluejackets from 
the Grand Fleet, who had come to see what *'Tommy" 
was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and 
saw a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing 
raid in that sector and the naval men did their little bit 
by the side of the lads in khaki, who liked this visit. They 
discovered the bomb store and opened such a Brock's 
benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with 
surprise. One young marine was bomb-slinging for four 
hours, and grinned at the prodigious memory as though 
he had had the time of his life. Another confessed to 
me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off 
all night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dug- 
outs, and every hour was a long thrill. 

*'I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had 
fought in several naval actions during the war and is a 
man of mark, "that I had a fair fright when I was doing 
duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to look through 
a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. *At 
night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the 
parapet I put my head, and presently I saw something 
moving between the lines. My rifle began to shake. 
Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. 
I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack. . . . But I'm 
blessed if it wasn't a swarm of rats!" 

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the 
trenches, and some of them played up a little audaciously, 
as, for instance, when a young fellow sat on the top of the 
parapet at dawn. 

"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of 

the bluejackets. 

"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man. 
16 



230 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

**A11 as cool as cucumbers," said a petty officer, *'and 
take the discomforts of trench Hfe as cheerily as any men 
could. It's marvelous. Good luck to them in the new 
year!" 

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who 
were mostly doomed to die, and I joined a crowd of them 
in a hall at Lillers on that New- Year's day. 

They were the heroes of Loos — or some of them — 
Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland High- 
landers, Gordons and King's Own Scottish Borderers, 
who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and 
away to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades 
there, and their battalions have been filled up with new 
drafts — of the same type as themselves and of the same 
grit — but that day no ghost of grief, no dark shadow of 
gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked 
round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which 
their wounded came in those days of the September 
battle. 

There were young men there from the Scottish univer- 
sities and from Highland farms, fitting shoulder to shoul- 
der in a jolly comradeship which burst into song between 
every mouthful of the feast. On the platform above the 
banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in, 
and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it. 

"And they're grand, the pipes," said one of the Camer- 
ons. "When I've been sae tired on the march I could 
have laid doon an' dee'd the touch o' the pipes has fair 
lifted me up agen." 

The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for 
Flighlanders, who sang old songs full of melancholy, 
which seemed to make the hearts of his comrades grow 
glad as when they helped him with "The Bonnie, Bonnie 
Banks of Loch Lomond." But the roof nearly flew off 
the hall to "The March of the Cameron Men," and the 
walls were greatly strained when the regimental marching 
song broke at every verse into wild Highland shouts and 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 231 

the war-cry which was heard at Loos of "Camerons, for- 
ward!" *' Forward, Camerons!" 

"An Englishman is good," said one of the Camerons, 
leaning over the table to me, "and an Irishman is good, 
but a Scot is the best of all." Then he struck the palm 
of one hand with the fist of another. "But the London 
men," he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good 
memory, "are as good as any fighting-men in France. 
My word, ye should have seen 'em on September 25th. 
And the London Irish were just lions!" 

Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a 
battalion of Argylls and Sutherlands, with several of his 
officers; a tall, thin officer with a long stride, who was 
killed when another year had passed. He beckoned to 
me and said: "I'm going the rounds of the billets to wish 
the men good luck in the new year. It's a strain on the 
constitution, as I have to drink their health each time!" 

He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something 
noble and chivalrous in the way he spoke to all his men, 
gathered together in various rooms in old Flemish houses, 
round plum-pudding from home or feasts provided by 
the army cooks. To each group of men he made the same 
kind of speech, thanking them from his heart for all their 
courage. 

"You were thanked by three generals," he said, "after 
your attack at Loos, and you upheld the old reputation 
of the regiment. I'm proud of you. And afterward, in 
November, when you had the devil of a time in the 
trenches, you stuck it splendidly and came out with high 
spirits. I wish you all a happy new year, and whatever 
the future may bring I know I can count on you." 

In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, 
and another three for the staff captain, and though the 
colonel protested that he was afraid of spending a night 
in the guard-room (there were shouts of laughter at this), 
he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the custom 
of the day. 

"Toodle-00, old bird!" said a kilted cockney, halfway 



232 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

up a ladder, on which he swayed perilously, being very 
drunk; but the colonel did not hear this familiar way of 
address. 

In many billets and in many halls the feast of Nev^- 
Year's day was kept in good comradeship by men who 
had faced death together, and who in the year that was 
coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields. 



VII 

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in Janu- 
ary, 1916, and for a long time afterward, had a grim way 
of fighting. The enemy never knew what they might do 
next. When they were most quiet they were most dan- 
gerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went 
out on red-Indian adventures over No Man's Land for 
fierce and scientific slaughter. 

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when 
a big party of them — all volunteers — went out one night 
with intent to get through the barbed wire outside a 
strong German position, to do a lot of killing there. They 
had trained for the job and thought out every detail of 
this hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so 
that they would not show white in the enemy's flares. 
They fastened flash-lamps to their bayonets so that they 
might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to 
save their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire. 

Stealthily they crawled over No Man's Land, crouch- 
ing in shell-holes every time a rocket rose and made a 
glimmer of light. They took their time at the wire, 
muflling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs crawled 
up with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. 
Then through the gap into the German trenches, and 
there were screams of German soldiers, terror-shaken by 
the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above 
them, and bayonets already red with blood. It was 
butcher's work, quick and skilful, like red-Indian scalp- 
ing. Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 233 

went back, with only two casualties. . . . The Germans 
were horrified by this sudden slaughter. They dared not 
come out on patrol work. Canadian scouts crawled 
down to them and insulted them, ingeniously, vilely, but 
could get no answer. Later they trained their machine- 
guns on German working-parties and swept crossroads 
on which supplies came up, and the Canadian sniper, in 
one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in sulky patience, 
and at last got his man. . . . They had to pay for all this, 
at Maple Copse, in June of '15, as I shall tell. But it was 
a vendetta which did not end until the war ended, and 
the Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, 
terrible, skilful patience which at last brought them to 
Mons on the day before armistice. 

I saw a good deal of the Canadians from first to last, 
and on many days of battle saw the tough, hard fighting 
spirit of these men. Their generals beheved in common 
sense applied to war, and not in high mysteries and secret 
rites which cannot be known outside the circle of initia- 
tion. I was impressed by General Currie, whom I met 
for the first time in that winter of 191 5-16, and wrote 
at the time that I saw in him "a leader of men who in 
open warfare might win great victories by doing the 
common-sense thing rapidly and decisively, to the surprise 
of an enemy working by elaborate science. He would, 
I think, astound them by the simplicity of his smashing 
stroke." Those words of mine were fulfilled — on the day 
when the Canadians helped to break the Drocourt-Queant 
line, and when they captured Cambrai, with English 
troops on their right, who shared their success. General 
Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, 
did not spare his men. He led them forward whatever 
the cost, but there was something great and terrible in 
his simphcity and sureness of judgment, and this real- 
estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was 
undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those 
trammels of red tape and tradition which swathed round 
so many of our own leaders. 



234 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

He cut clean to the heart of things, ruthlessly, like a 
surgeon, and as I watched that man, immense in bulk, 
with a heavy, thoughtful face and stern eyes that softened 
a little when he smiled, I thought of him as Oliver Crom- 
well. He was severe as a disciphnarian, and not beloved 
by many men. But his staff-officers, who stood in awe 
of him, knew that he demanded truth and honesty, and 
that his brain moved quickly to sure decisions and saw 
big problems broadly and with understanding. He had 
good men with him — mostly amateurs — but with hard 
business heads and the same hatred of red tape and 
niggling ways which belonged to their chief. So the 
Canadian Corps became a powerful engine on our side 
when it had learned many lessons in blood and tragedy. 
They organized their pubHcity side in the same masterful 
way, and were determined that what Canada did the 
world should know — and damn all censorship. They 
bought up English artists, photographers, and writing- 
men to record their exploits. With Lord Beaverbrook in 
England they engineered Canadian propaganda with 
immense energy, and Canada believed her men made up 
the British army and did all the fighting. I do not 
blame them, and only wish that the English soldier should 
have been given his share of the honors that belonged to 
him — the lion's share. 

VIII 

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. 
It became part of the routine of war, that quick killing in 
the night, for English and Scottish and Irish and Welsh 
troops, and some had luck with it, and some men liked it, 
and to others it was a horror which they had to do, and 
always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might 
lead to tragedy. 

I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in 
January of '15, which was typical of many others^, before 
raids developed into minor battles, with all the guns at 
work. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 235 

There were four lieutenants who drew up the plan and 
called for volunteers, and it was one of these who went 
out first and alone to reconnoiter the ground and to find 
the best way through the German barbed wire. He just 
slipped out over the parapet and disappeared into the 
darkness. When he came back he had a wound in the 
wrist — it was just the bad luck of a chance bullet — but 
brought in valuable knowledge. He had found a gap in 
the enemy's wire which would give an open door to the 
party of visitors. He had also tested the wire farther 
along, and thought it could be cut without much bother. 

"Good enough!" was the verdict, and a detachment 
started out for No Man's Land, divided into two parties. 

The enemy trenches were about one hundred yards 
away, which seems a mile in the darkness and the loneli- 
ness of the dead ground. At regular intervals the Ger- 
man rockets flared up so that the hedges and wire and 
parapets along their line were cut out ink-black against 
the white illumination, and the two patrols of Yorkshire- 
men who had been crawling forward stopped and 
crouched lov/er and felt themselves revealed, and then 
when darkness hid them again went on. 

The party on the left were now close to the German 
wire and under the shelter of a hedge. They felt their 
way along until the two subalterns who were leading 
came to the gap which had been reported by the first 
explorer. They listened intently and heard the German 
sentry stamping his feet and pacing up and down. Pres- 
ently he began to whistle softly, utterly unconscious of 
the men so close to him — so close now that any stumble, 
any clatter of arms, any word spoken, would betray them. 

The two lieutenants had their revolvers ready and 
crept forward to the parapet. The men had to act ac- 
cording to instinct now, for no order could be given, and 
one of them found his instinct led him to clamber right 
into the German trench a few yards away from the sentry, 
but on the other side of the traverse. He had not been 
there long, holding his breath and crouching like a wolf. 



236 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

before footsteps came toward him and he saw the ghnt 
of a cigarette. 

It was a German officer going his round. The York- 
shire boy sprang on to the parapet again, and lay across 
it with his head toward our hnes and his legs dangling 
in the German trench. The German officer's cloak 
brushed his heels, but the boy twisted round a httle and 
stared at him as he passed. But he passed, and presently 
the sentry began to whistle again, some old German tune 
which cheered him in his loneliness. He knew nothing 
of the eyes watching him through the darkness nor of his 
nearness to death. 

It was the first lieutenant who tried to shoot him. But 
the revolver was muddy and would not fire. Perhaps a 
click disturbed the sentry. Anyhow, the moment had 
come for quick work. It was the sergeant who sprang 
upon him, down from the parapet with one pounce. A 
frightful shriek, with the shrill agony of a boy's voice, 
wailed through the silence. The sergeant had his hand 
about the German boy's throat and tried to strangle him 
and to stop another dreadful cry. 

The second officer made haste. He thrust his revolver 
close to the struggling sentry and shot him dead, through 
the neck, just as he was falling limp from a blow on the 
head given by the butt-end of the weapon which had 
failed to fire. The bullet did its work, though it passed 
through the sergeant's hand, which had still held the man 
by the throat. The alarm had been raised and German 
soldiers v\7ere running to the rescue. 

"Quick!" said one of the officers. 

There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop 
into the wet ditch, and a race for home over No Man's 
Land, which was white under the German flares and 
noisy with the waspish note of bullets. 

The other party were longer away and had greater 
trouble to find a way through, but they, too, got home, 
with one officer badly wounded, and wonderful luck to 
escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from "the jumps" 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 237 

for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their 
own barbed wire, as though the English were out there 
again. And at the sound of those bombs the West Yorks 
laughed all along their trenches. 



IX 

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar 
in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the 
midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of 
men belonging to that British family of ours which sent 
its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all 
the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, 
all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition 
which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is 
found about the world. 

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through 
all the years of war over the Flemish marshlands, and 
there were Highlanders and Lowlanders with every dialect 
over the border. In one line of trenches the German 
soldiers hstened to part-songs sung in such trained har- 
mony that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had 
come into the firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their 
own language. For a time no ofl&cer received his com- 
mand unless he spoke it as fluently as running water by 
Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue 
until a few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form 
fours and know their left hand from their right in 
Welsh. 

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the lan- 
guage of the peasants in these market towns. Soldiers 
from Somerset used many old Saxon words which puzzled 
their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought 
the northern bur with them and the grit of the northern 
spirit. And Ireland, though she would not have con- 
scription, sent some of the bravest of her boys out there, 
and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons 
the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly 



238 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

again, and the blood of her race has been poured out 
upon these tragic fields. 

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so 
crowded with Irish boys at the beginning of 'i6 that I 
found it hard not to believe that a part of old Ireland 
itself had found its way to Flanders. In one old out- 
house the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish 
cows lay cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp 
straw, which gave out a sweet, sickly stench, while the 
Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the loft, to which they 
climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs. 

I went up the ladder after them — it was very shaky in 
the middle — and, putting my head through the loft, gave 
a greeting to a number of dark figures lying in the same 
kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One boy was 
sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny 
whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under 
the straws. 

"The craytures are that bold," said a boy from County 
Cork, "that when we first came in they sat up smilin' 
and sang 'God Save Ireland.' Bedad, and it's the truth 
I'm after tellin' ye." 

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to 
be away from the shells, even if the rain came through 
the beams of a broken roof and soaked through the plaster 
of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at making 
wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were 
a few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked 
potato was no Protestant with a grudge against the 
Pope. 

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the 
Dublins and the Munsters were up in the firing-line at the 
HohenzoUern. The shelling was so violent that it was 
difficult to get up the supplies, and some of the 
boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was 
the only complaint which one of them made when I 
asked him what he thought of his first experience under 
fire. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 239 

"It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I'd been after 
thinking, if only my appetite had not been bigger than 
my belt, at all." 

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who 
had just come out from the old country to join their 
comrades in the firing-line. When the Germans put over 
a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding 
men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted 
to get over the parapet and make a dash for the enemy. 
"'Twould taych him a lesson," they told their officers, 
who had some trouble in restraining them. 

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which 
goes on behind the lines at night — out in the open, with- 
out the shelter of a trench. It was nervous work, espe- 
cially when the German flares went up, silhouetting their 
figures on the sky-line, and when one of the enemy's 
machine-guns began to chatter. But the Irish boys found 
the heart for a jest, and one of them, resting on his spade 
a moment, stared over to the enemy's lines and said, 
"May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that 
typewriter!" 

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had 
come fresh to the trenches, some of those boys who had 
not guessed the realities of war until then. But they 
came out proudly — "with their tails up," said one of their 
officers — after their baptism of fire. 

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising 
in an old barn on the wayside, and presently, in honor of 
visitors — who were myself and another — the pipers were 
sent for. They were five tall lads, who came striding 
down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags 
under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on 
the straw around them and the drummers standing with 
their sticks ready, they took their breath for "the good 
old Irish tune" demanded by the captain. 

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in 
Irish yesterdays, and it held the passion of many rebellious 
hearts and the yearning of them. 



240 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? 
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground. 

She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; 
They're hanging men and women there for wearing of the green. 

Then the pipers played the ''March of O'Neill," a wild 
old air as shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who 
came with their Irish battle-cries against Elizabeth's pike- 
men and Cromwell's Ironsides. 

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in 
Ireland, and the old people there, would have been glad 
to stand with me outside that Flemish barn and to hear 
the old tunes of their race played by the boys who were 
out there fighting. 

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears 
in the eyes of an Irish soldier by my side, for it was the 
spirit of Ireland herself, with all her poetry, and her 
valor, and her faith in liberty, which came crying from 
those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could 
carry across the sea. 

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come 
out of Guichy, a poor remnant of the strength that had 
gone in, all tattered and torn, and caked with the filth 
of battle, and hardly able to stagger along. But they 
pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when 
they passed their brigadier, who called out words of 
praise to them. 

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the 
last of them, after a battle in Flanders, when they were 
massacred, and lay in heaps round German redoubts, up 
there in the swamps. 

X 

Early in the morning of February 23 d there was a 
clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft 
as though it would be a good flying-day. But before mid- 
day the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and then it 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT; 241 

snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders 
were white. 

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone 
which had changed all the pictures of war by a white 
enchantment. The villages where our soldiers were 
billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from 
Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in 
soft, downy ridges on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, 
with its purity, the rubbish heaps in Flemish farmyards 
and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where British 
soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely 
country which led to the trenches, every furrow in the 
fields was a thin white ridge, and the trees, which were 
just showing a shimmer of green, stood ink-black against 
the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak down 
each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old 
windmills of Flanders which looked down upon the 
battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes, 
so that each rib of their sails and each rung of their lad- 
ders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined 
like a frosty cobweb. 

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through 
the blizzard with ermine mantles over their mackintosh 
capes, and mounted men with their heads bent to the 
storm were like white knights riding through a white 
wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun- 
limbers drawn up by their batteries, the field ambulances 
by the clearing hospitals, were all cloaked in snow, and 
the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in the 
great quietude. 

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white 
pillows of the piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries 
standing in the shelter of the traverses. The tarpaulin 
roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so changed 
by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places 
of fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a 
Christmas hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their 
feet and blowing on their fingers and keeping their rifles dry. 



242 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty 
even to No Man's Land, making a lace-work pattern o£ 
barbed wire, and lying very softly over the tumbled ground 
of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of destruction and 
death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes 
fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them 
tenderly. It was as though all the doves of peace were 
flying down to fold their wings above the obscene things 
of war. 

For a little while the snow brought something like 
peace. The guns were quieter, for artillery observation 
was impossible. There could be no sniping, for the 
scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches. The 
airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly 
to the powdered fields and took shelter in their sheds. A 
great hush was over the war zone, but there was some- 
thing grim, suggestive of tragic drama, in this silent 
countryside, so white even in the darkness, where millions 
of men were waiting to kill one another. 

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by 
soldiers, who were quick to see a chance of fun. Men 
who had been hurling bombs in the Ypres salient bom- 
barded one another with hand-grenades, which burst 
noiselessly except for the shouts of laughter that sig- 
naled a good hit. 

French soldiers were at the same game in one village 
I passed, where the snow-fight ^as fast and furious, and 
some of our officers led an attack upon old comrades with 
the craft of trappers and an expert knowledge of enfilade 
fire. The white peace did not last long. The ermine 
mantle on the battlefield was stained by scarlet patches 
as soon as men could see to fight again. 



XI 

For some days in that February of 1916 the war cor- 
respondents in the Chateau of Tilques, from which they 
made their expeditions to the line, M^ere snowed up like 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 243 

the army round them. Not even the motor-cars could 
move through that snow which drifted across the roads. 
We sat indoors talking — high treason sometimes — pon- 
dering over the problem of a war from which there seemed 
no way out, becoming irritable with one another's com- 
pany, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics 
of war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the 
guilt of Germany, and the dishonesty of British politi- 
cians. Futile, foolish arguments, while men were being 
killed in great numbers, as daily routine, without result! 

Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine 
with us, some of them generals with elaborate theories 
on war and a passionate hatred of Germany, seeing no 
other evil in the world; some of them brigadiers with 
tales of appalling brutality (which caused great laughter), 
some of them battalion officers with the point of view of 
those who said, " M oritur i te saluantf* 

There was one whose conversation I remember (having 
taken notes of it before I turned in that night). It was 
a remarkable conversation, summing up many things of 
the same kind which I had heard in stray sentences by 
other officers, and month by month, years afterward, 
heard again, spoken with passion. This officer who had 
come out to France in 1914 and had been fighting ever 
since by a luck which had spared his life when so many 
of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak with 
passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He 
said that G. H. Q. was a close corporation in the hands of 
the military clique who had muddled through the South 
African War, and were now going to muddle through a 
worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind im- 
pregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red 
tape, and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots 
who believed that the Empire depended upon their sys- 
tem. They had no doubt of their inherent right to con- 
duct the war, which was "their war," without interference 
or criticism or publicity. They spent many hours of 
the days and nights in writing letters to one another, and 



244 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

those who wrote most letters received most decorations, 
and felt, with a patriotic fire within their breasts, that 
they were getting on with the war. 

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, in- 
trigues, perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval 
court. Each general and stafF-officer had his followers 
and his sycophants, who jostled for one another's jobs, 
fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and made 
him believe in his omniscience. Among the General 
Staff there were various grades — G. S. O. I, G. S. O. II, 
G. S. O. Ill, and those in the lower grades fought for a 
higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and diplo- 
macy and back-stair influence. They worked late into the 
night. That is to say, they went back to their offices 
after dining at mess — "so frightfully busy, you know, old 
man!" — and kept their lights burning, and smoked more 
cigarettes, and rang one another up on the telephone with 
futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing 
something from being down somewhere. The war to 
them was a far-off thing essential to their way of life, as 
miners in the coal-fields are essential to statesmen in 
Downing Street, especially in cold weather. But it did 
not touch their souls or their bodies. They did not see 
its agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were 
always cheerful, breezy, bright with optimism. They 
made a little work go a long way. They were haughty 
and arrogant with subordinate officers, or at the best 
affable and condescending, and to superior officers they 
said, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," "Quite so, sir," to any state- 
ment, however absurd in its ignorance and dogmatism. 
If a major-general said, "Wagner was a mountebank in 
music," G. S. O. Ill, who had once studied at Munich, 
said, "Yes, sir," or, "You think so, sir? Of course you're 
right." 

If a lieutenant-colonel said, "Browning was not a poet," 
a staff captain, who had read Browning at Cambridge 
with passionate admiration, said: "I quite agree with you, 
sir. And who do you think was a poet, sir,?" 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 245 

It was the army system. The opinion of a superior 
officer was correct, always. It did not admit of con- 
tradiction. It was not to be criticized. Its ignorance 
was wisdom. 

G. H. Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, 
rose-colored, remote from the ugly things of war. They 
had heard of the trenches, jts, but as the Wesc End hears 
of the East End — a nasty place where common people 
lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society 
folk go slumming, and came back proud of having seen 
a shell burst, having braved the lice and the dirt. 

"The trenches are the slums," said our guest. "We 
are the Great Unwashed. We are the Mud-larks." 

There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was 
away out in advance of our lines. It was not connected 
with our own trench system. It had been left derelict 
by both sides and was a ditch in No Man's Land. But 
our men were ordered to hold it — "to save sniping." A 
battalion commander protested to the Headquarters Staff. 
There was no object in holding J. 3. It was a target for 
German guns and a temptation to German miners. 

"J. 3," came the staff command, "must be held until 
further orders." 

We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench 
and all in it were thrown up by mines. Among those 
killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the husband of 
Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown. 

Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve 
Chapelle. "This is a death sentence," said the officers 
who were ordered to attack. But they attacked, and 
died, with great gallantry, as usual. 

"In the slums," said our guest, "we are expected to 
die if G. H. Q. tells us so, or if the corps arranges our 
funeral. And generally we do." 

That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened 
to the rumbling of the gunning away in the salient, and 
seemed to hear the groans of men at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, 
in other awful places. The irony of that guest of ours 



246 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Ws frightful. It was bitter beyond justice, though with 
truth in the mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the 
waste of life and heroism; . . . when I met him later in 
the war he was on the staff. 



XII 

The world — our side of it — held its breath and felt its 
own heart-beat when, in February of that year '15, the 
armies of the German Crown Prince launched their offen- 
sive against the French at Verdun. It was the biggest 
offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and 
as the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men 
against the French and brought up new guns to replace 
their losses, there was no doubt that in this battle the 
Germans were trying by all their weight to smash their 
way to victory through the walls which the French had 
built against them by living flesh and spirit. 

**Will they hold?" was the question which every man 
among us asked of his neighbor and of his soul. 

On our front there was nothing of war beyond the daily 
routine of the trenches and the daily list of deaths and 
wounds. Winter had closed down upon us in Flanders, 
and through its fogs and snows came the news of that 
conflict round Verdun to the waiting army, which was 
ours. The news was bad, yet not the worst. Poring 
over maps of the French front, we in our winter quarters 
saw with secret terror, some of us with a bluster of false 
optimism, some of us with unjustified despair, that the 
French were giving ground, giving ground slowly, after 
heroic resistance, after dreadful massacre, and steadily. 
They were falling back to the inner line of forts, hard 
pressed. The Germans, in spite of monstrous losses under 
the flail of the soixante-quinzes, were forcing their way 
from slope to slope, capturing positions which all but 
dominated the whole of the Verdun heights. 

"If the French break we shall lose the war," said the 
pessimist. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 247 

"The French will never lose Verdun," said the opti- 
mist. 

"Why not? What are your reasons beyond that 
cursed optimism which has been our ruin? Why an- 
nounce things like that as though divinely inspired? For 
God's sake let us stare straight at the facts." 

"The Germans are losing the war by this attack on 
Verdun. They are just pouring their best soldiers into 
the furnace — burning the flower of their army. It is our 
gain. It will lead in the end to our victory." 

" But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses ? 
Don't they get killed, too? The German artillery is flog- 
ging them with shell-fire from seventeen-inch guns, 
twelve-inch, nine-inch, every bloody and monstrous 
engine. The French are weak in heavy artillery. For 
that error, which has haunted them from the beginning, 
they are now paying with their life's blood — the life blood 
of France." 

"You are arguing on emotion and fear. Haven't you 
learned yet that the attacking side always loses more than 
the defense?" 

"That is a sweeping statement. It depends on relative 
man-power and gun-power. Given a superiority of guns 
and men, and attack is cheap. Defense is blown off the 
earth. Otherwise how could we ever hope to win?" 

"I agree. But the forces at Verdun are about equal, 
and the French have the advantage of position. The 
Germans are committing suicide." 

"Humbug! They know what they are doing. They 
are the greatest soldiers in Europe." 
"Led by men with bone heads." 
"By great scientists." 

"By the traditional rules of medievalism. By bald- 
headed vultures in spectacles with brains like penny-in- 
the-slot machines. Put in a penny and out comes a rule 
of war. Mad egoists! Colossal blunderers! Efficient in 
all things but knowledge of life." 

"Then God help our British G. H. Q.!" 



248 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

A long silence. The silence of men who see monstrous 
forces at work, in which human lives are tossed like 
straws in flame. A silence reaching back to old ghosts 
of history, reaching out to supernatural aid. Then from 
one speaker or another a kind of curse and a kind of 
prayer. 

"Hell! ... God help us all!" 

So it was in our mess where war correspondents and 
censors sat down together after futile journeys to dirty 
places to see a bit of shell-fire, a few dead bodies, a line 
of German trenches through a periscope, a queue of 
wounded men outside a dressing station, the survivors of 
a trench raid, a bombardment before a "minor opera- 
tion," a trench-mortar "stunt," a new part of the line. 
. . . Verdun was the only thing that mattered in March 
and April until France had saved herself and all of us. 

XIII 

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, 
but rendered great service to France at that time. By 
February of 191 5 we had taken over a new line of front, 
extending from our positions round Loos southward to 
the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this move- 
ment in February that Marshal Joffre made allusion 
when, in a message to our Commander-in-Chief on March 
2d, he said that "the French army remembered that its 
recent call on the comradeship of the British army met 
with an immediate and complete response." 

By liberating an immense number of French troops of 
the Tenth Army and a mass of artillery from this part of 
the front, we had the good fortune to be of great service 
to France at a time when she needed many men and guns 
to repel the assault upon Verdun. 

Some of her finest troops — men who had fought in 
many battles and had held the trenches with most dogged 
courage — were here in this sector of the western front, 
and many batteries of heavy and light artillery had been 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 249 

in these positions since the early months of the war. It 
was, therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to 
the defense of Verdun when British troops replaced them 
at the time the enemy made his great attack. 

The French went away from this part of their battle- 
front with regret and emotion. To them it was sacred 
ground, this line from the long ridge of Notre Dame de 
Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to Hebu- 
terne, where it linked up with the British army already 
on the Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of 
their heroic dead. 

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw 
the visible reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn 
there, and told the story of all the struggle there by the 
upheaval of earth, the wreckage of old trenches, the mine- 
craters and shell-holes, and the litter of battle in every 
part of that countryside. 

I went there first — to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette 
looking northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, 
which the enemy held as a strong barrier against us 
above the village of Souchez and Ablain St.-Nazaire and 
Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured — 
when they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I 
saw in their places the men who had lived there and fought 
there as one may read in the terrible and tragic narrative 
of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu. 

I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never 
once did he admit any fine weather to alleviate the suffer- 
ings of his comrades, thereby exaggerating their misery 
somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a white, dank 
mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the 
way to the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the under- 
growth, which was torn by shell-fire, and to every blade 
of grass growing rankly round the lips of shell-craters 
in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red panta- 
loons of the first French armies who had fought through 
those woods in the beginning of the war. 

I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had 



2SO NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

smashed down some of the crosses, but had not damaged 
the memorial to the men who had stormed up the slope 
of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when their 
comrades chased the Germans to the village below. 

A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the 
undergrowth with a French captain, and they burst 
among the trees with shattering boughs. I remember 
that Httle officer in a steel helmet, and I could see a Nor- 
man knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. 
He stood so often on the sky-line, in full view of the 
enemy (I was thankful for the mxist), that I admired but 
deplored his audacity. Without any screen to hide us 
we walked down the hillside, gathering clots of greasy 
mud in our boots, stumbHng, and once sprawling. An- 
other French captain joined us and became the guide. 

"This road is often 'Marmite,'" he said, "but I have 
escaped so often I have a kind of fatalism." 

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells 
which a few minutes before had burst in our immediate 
neighborhood, cutting off twigs of trees and one branch 
with a scatter of steel as sharp as knives and as heavy as 
sledge-hammers. 

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, 
which afterward I passed through scores of times on the 
way to Vimy when that ridge was ours. The ragged ruin 
of its church was white and ghostly in the mist. On the 
right of the winding road which led through it was Sou- 
chez Wood, all blasted and riven, and beyond a huddle of 
bricks which once was Souchez village. 

"Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground," 
said the French officer. "Their bodies lie thick below 
the soil. Poor France! Poor France!" 

He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the 
vision of all that youth of France which even then, in 
March of 'i6, had been offered up in vast sacrifice to the 
greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down now, 
beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French 
soldiers who stood shivering by the ruined walls while 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 251 

trench-mortars were making a tumult in the neighbor- 
hood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse — his com- 
rades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed 
together in a confraternity of misery. They were plas- 
tered with wet clay, and their boots were enlarged gro- 
tesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue coats 
were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and 
made pools round their feet. They were unshaven, and 
their wet faces were smeared with the soil of the trenches. 

"How goes it?" said the French captain with me. 

*'It does not go," said the French sergeant. "'Cre 
nom de Dieu! — my men are not gay to-day. They have 
been wet for three weeks and their bones are aching. 
This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a 
little fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the 
dirty Boche starts shelHng again. So we do not get dry, 
and we have no warmth, and we cannot make even a 
cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there on 
Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his 
sleeve and says those poor devils of Frenchmen are not 
gay to-day! That is true, mon Capitaine. Mais, que 
voulez-vous? C'est pour la France." 

"Qui. C'est pour la France." 

The French captain turned away and I could see that 
he pitied those comrades of his as we went over cratered 
earth to the village of Neuville St.-Vaast. 

"Poor fellows," he said, presently. "Not even a cup 
of hot coffee! . . , That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, 
yes — afterward! But at what a price!" 

So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once 
with a fine church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town 
hall, many little streets of comfortable houses under the 
shelter of the friendly old hill of Vimy, and within easy 
walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish heap mingled 
with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies' peram- 
bulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts. 

Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a 
heavy burden lay under a blood-soaked blanket. 



252 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

**It is a bad wound?" asked the captain. 

The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and 
uncovered a face, waxen, the color of death. It was the 
face of a handsome man with a pointed beard, breathing 
snuffily through his nose. 

*'He may live as far as the dressing station," said one 
of the Frenchmen. "It was a trench-mortar which blew 
a hole in his body just now, over there." 

The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand- 
bags at the end of a street of ruin. 

Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, 
hobbling gait. Both of them were wounded in the legs, 
and had tied rags round their wounds tightly. They 
looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed, 
with brooding eyes. 

*'The German trench-mortars are very evil," said the 
captain. 

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously 
above sand-bags to look at the German lines cut into the 
lower slopes of Vimy, and thrust out by communication 
trenches to the edge of the village in which we walked. 
A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the cap- 
tain, who stepped back and said, in an emotional way: 

"Tiens! C'est toi, Edouard?" 

"Oui, men Capitaine." 

The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes 
and long, black eyelashes. 

*' You are a lieutenant, then ? How does it go, Edouard ? " 

**It does not go," answered the boy like that French 
sergeant in Ablain St.-Nazaire. **This is a bad place. 
I lose my men every day. There were three killed yes- 
terday, and six wounded. To-day already there are two 
killed and ten wounded." 

Something broke in his voice. 

*'Ce n'est pas bon du tout, du tout!" ("It is not 
good at all, at all!") 

The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to 
cheer him. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 253 

"Courage, mon vieux!" 

The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in 
deep, greasy mud. Sharp stabs of flame vomited out of 
the slopes of Vimy. There was the high, long-drawn 
scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette. 
Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their 
shells cut through the air above us like scythes. The 
caldron in this pit of war was being stirred up. Another 
wounded poilu was carried past us, covered by a bloody 
blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags and 
wet ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. 
A boot with some pulp inside protruded from a mud- 
bank where I stood, and there was a human head, without 
eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of a shell- 
hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year 
before, when swarms of boys, of the '16 class, boys of 
eighteen, the flower of French youth, rushed forward from 
the crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards away, 
to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They capt- 
ured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and 
wounded — at least three thousand dead. They fought 
like young demons through the flaming streets. They 
fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine- 
guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under 
the sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian 
Guard that day. 

Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame 
de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had 
fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Laby- 
rinth — sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, 
an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, 
by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight 
with their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the 
bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or 
above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for 
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez 
and the Labyrinth, until in February of '16 they went 
away after greeting our khaki men who came into their 



254 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen 
there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused 
trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the 
earth down and uncovered them. 



XIV 

It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of 
Arras passed for defense into British hands and became 
from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of 
the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the 
ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many 
days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and 
sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy 
khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand 
at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their 
laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in 
the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory 
that cost as much sometimes as defeat. 

When I first went into Arras during its occupation by 
the French I remembered a day, fifteen months before, 
near the town of St.-Pol in Artois, where I was caught up 
in one of those tides of fugitives which in those early 
days of war used to roll back in a state of terror before 
the German invasion. "Where do they come from?" I 
asked, watching this long procession of gigs and farmers' 
carts and tramping women and children. The answer told 
me everything. "They are bombarding Arras, m'sieur." 

Since then "They" had never ceased to bombard Arras. 
From many points of view, as I had come through the 
countryside at night, I had seen the flashes of shells over 
that city and had thought of the agony inside. Four 
days before I went in first it was bombarded with one 
hundred and fifty seventeen-inch shells, each one of which 
would destroy a cathedral. It was with a sense of being 
near to death — not a pleasant feeling, you understand — 
that I went into Arras for the first time and saw what 
had happened to it. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 255 

I was very near to the Germans. No more than ten 
yards away, when I stood peering through a hole in the 
wall of the Maison Rouge in the suburb of Blangy — it 
was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a piano in the 
parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of 
sand-bags — and no more than two hundred yards away 
from the enemy's lines when I paced up and down the 
great railway station of Arras, where no trains ever 
traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been 
encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried 
to batter a way into and through it. An endless battle 
had surged up against its walls, but in spite of all their 
desperate attacks no German soldier had set foot inside 
the city except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands 
of young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it. 

The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and 
blood and the spirit of heroic men, but he had destroyed 
the city bit by bit. It was pitiful beyond all expression. 
It was worse than looking upon a woman whose beauty 
had been scarred by bloody usage. 

For Arras was a city of beauty — a living expression in 
stone of all the idealism in eight hundred years of history, 
a most sweet and gracious place. Even then, after a 
year's bombardment, some spiritual exhalation of human 
love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I 
entered the city and wandered a little in its public gar- 
dens before going into its dead heart — the Grande Place 
— I felt the strange survival. The trees here were slashed 
by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up those 
pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down. 

Almost every house had been hit, every building was 
scarred and slashed, but for the most part the city still 
stood, so that I went through many long streets and passed 
long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful in their 
silence and desolation and ruin. 

Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an 
enormous building of the Renaissance, not beautiful, 
but impressive in its spaciousness and dignity. Next to 



256 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

it was the bishop's palace, with long corridors and halls, 
and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the 
fury of great shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in 
girth as giant trees had been snapped off to the base. 
The dome of the cathedral opened with a yawning 
chasm. High explosives burst through the walls. The 
keystones of arches were blown out, and masses of 
masonry were piled into the nave and aisles. 

As I stood there, rooks had perched in the broken 
vaulting and flew with noisy wings above the ruined 
altars. Another sound came like a great beating of 
wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the vibra- 
tion of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it 
fell with a clatter to the littered floor. On the way to 
the ruin of the bishop's chapel I passed a group of stone 
figures. They were the famous "Angels of Arras" re- 
moved from some other part of the building to what 
might have been a safer place. 

Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. 
But in the chapel be^^ond, where the light streamed 
through the broken panes of stained-glass windows, one 
figure stood untouched in all this ruin. It was a tall 
statue of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and 
sorrow, as though in the presence of those who crucified 
Him. 

Yet something more wonderful than this scene of 
tragedy lived in the midst of it. Yet there were still 
people living in Arras. 

They lived an underground life, for the most part, 
coming up from the underworld to blink in the sunlight, 
to mutter a prayer or a curse or two, to gaze for a moment 
at any change made by a new day's bombardment, and 
then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun. 

Through low archways just above the pavement, I 
looked down into some of the deep-vaulted cellars where 
the merchants used to stock their wine, and saw old 
women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over 
little stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 257 

domestic work. Some of them looked up as I passed, 
and my eyes and theirs stared into each other. The 
women's faces were Hned and their eyes sunken. They 
had the look of people who have lived through many 
agonies and have more to suffer. 

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. 
There was a greengrocer's shop still carrying on a little 
trade. I went into another shop and bought some pict- 
ure post-cards of the ruins within a few yards of it. The 
woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed 
because she had no change. Only two days before a 
seventeen-inch shell had burst fifty yards or so away 
from her shop, which was close enough for death. I 
marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was 
it courage or stupidity .f* 

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in 
a friendly way and called me cher petit ami, and de- 
scribed how she had been nearly killed a hundred times. 
When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old wom- 
an's cackling laugh and said, "Que voulez-vous, jeune 
homme?" which did not seem a satisfactory answer. As 
dusk crept into the streets of Arras I saw small groups 
of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in 
the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. "Are 
you afraid of the shells?" I asked. They grimaced up 
at the sky and giggled. They had got used to the hell of 
it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a 
whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his 
lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when 
English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls 
who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or 
two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to 
stay. Overhead shells were howling. Their city was 
stricken with death. These women lived like witches in 
a cave — a strange and dreadful life. 

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St. -Nicolas 
and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from 
Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind — prob- 



258 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ably for beet sugar — and then a street of small houses 
with back yards and gardens much like those in our own 
suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of 
the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded 
with barbed wire and sand-bags, and the passage from 
house to house and between the overturned boilers of the 
factory formed a communication trench to the advanced 
outpost in the last house held by the French, on the 
other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way 
through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly 
and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which 
was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence 
was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten 
yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles 
always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a 
chink no wider than my finger I could see the red-brick 
ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road 
to Douai. . . . The road to Douai as seen through this 
chink was a tangle of broken bricks. 

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held 
it that there were many places where one had to step 
quietly and duck one's head, or get behind the shelter of 
a broken wall, to avoid a sniper's bullet or the rattle of 
bullets from a machine-gun. 

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness 
closed in its ruined streets and shells were crashing over 
the city from French guns, answered now and then by 
enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I 
heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed hke the 
sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the 
days of its agony, and I thought of that solitary bell 
sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way. 

XV 

While we hung on the news from Verdun — it seemed as 
though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont — 
our own lists of death grew longer. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 259 

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more 
mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the 
ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutch- 
ing at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, 
with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, 
and gas. 

"O Christ!" said one of them whom I knew. He had 
been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-train. 

"Now you will be comfortable and happy," said the 
R. A. M. C. orderly. 

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable 
agony, and, grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little 
with a wet sweat breaking out on his forehead. 

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big 
bandage. He told me that it was smashed to bits, and 
began to cry. Then he smudged the tears away and said: 

"I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed." 

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our 
men endured. 

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist 
at all under the shell-fire which the Germans flung over 
our trenches and which we flung over theirs. So it seemed 
to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round 
Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of 
our little hells. 

"Things happened," said one of them, "which in other 
times would have been called miracles. We all had hair- 
breadth escapes from death." For days they were under 
heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of sand and earth 
and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then 
trench-mortars and bombs. 

"It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. 
"None of us expected to come out alive." 

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that 
time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse 
they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried pota- 
toes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black 
coffee. 



26o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge — you 
remember Hooge? — the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions 
took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy 
crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like 
devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred 
casualties in one battalion The German gun-fire length- 
ened, and men were killed on their way out to "rest"- 
camps to the left of the road between Poperinghe and 
Vlamertinghe. 

On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northum- 
berland Fusiliers — the old Fighting Fifth — captured six 
hundred yards of German trenches near St.-Eloi and 
asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who 
followed them. Their attack was against a German 
stronghold built of earth and sand-bags nine feet high, 
above a nest of trenches in the fork of two roads from St.- 
Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place and 
it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil 
in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, 
flinging bombs through barbed wire and over sand-bags 
which had escaped the radius of the mine-burst — in one 
jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to 
kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got 
to work on them. It was knocked out by a bomb flung 
by an officer who saved his company. The machine- 
gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out 
of which living men came, shaking and moaning. 

I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers 
come back from this exploit, exhausted, caked from head 
to foot in wet clay. Their steel helmets were covered 
with sand-bagging, their trench-waders, their rifles, and 
smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, 
and they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered 
from the fields of France. Some of them had shawls tied 
about their helmets, and some of them wore the shiny 
black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray coats 
of German soldiers. They had had luck. They had not 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 261 

left many comrades behind, and they had come out with 
life to the good world. Tired as they were, they came 
along as though to carnival. They had proved their 
courage through an ugly job. They had done "damn 
well," as one of them remarked; and they were out of 
the shell-fire which ravaged the ground they had taken, 
where other men lay. 

XVI 

At the beginning of March there was a little affair — 
costing a lot of lives — in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up 
in the Ypres salient. It was a struggle for a dirty hillock 
called the Bluff, which had been held for a long time by 
the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose men were 
at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 
17th Division commanded by General Pilcher. The Ger- 
mans took advantage of the change in defense by a sud- 
den attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men of 
the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned a posi- 
tion of some local importance. 

General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of 
which he knew every inch. It was ground which men of 
his had died to hold. It was very annoying — using a 
feeble word — to battalion officers and men of the 3d Divi- 
sion — Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and 
Royal Scots — who had first come out of the salient, out 
of its mud and snow and slush and shell-fire, to a pretty 
village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where 
they were getting back to a sense of normal life again. 
Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires, 
listening with enchantment to the silence about them, 
free from the noise of artillery. They were hugging them- 
selves with the thought of a month of this. . . . Then be- 
cause they had been in the salient so long and had held 
this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to 
recapture the position lost by new men. 

After a day of field sports they were having a boxing- 
match in an old barn, very merry and bright, before that 
18 



262 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

news came to them. General Haldane had given me a 
quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing, and the 
faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity 
for the frightful disappointment that was about to fall 
on them, like a sledge-hammer. I knew some of their 
officers — Colonel Dyson of the Royal Scots, and Captain 
Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways with a 
deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and 
of their own officers. Colonel Dyson was the seven- 
teenth commanding officer of his battalion, which had 
been commanded by every officer down to second lieu- 
tenant, and had only thirty men left of the original 
crowd. They had been slain in large numbers in that 
"holding attack" by Hooge on September 25th, during 
the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they were " going 
in" again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid 
their feelings from their men. The men were tough and 
stalwart lads, tanned by the wind and rain of a foul 
winter, thinned down by the ordeal of those months in 
the line under daily bouts of fire. In a wooden gallery 
of the barn a mass of them lay in deep straw, exchanging 
caps, whistling, shouting, in high spirits. Not yet did 
they know the call-back to the salient. Then word was 
passed to them after the boxing finals. That night they 
had to march seven miles to entrain for the railroad 
nearest to Ypres. I saw them march away, silently, 
grimly, bravely, without many curses. 

They Vv'ere to recapture the Blufi^, and early on the 
morning of March 2d, before dawn had risen, I went out 
to the salient and watched the bombardment which pre- 
ceded the attack. There was an incessant tumult of 
guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country 
of the salient and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the 
Wytschaete Ridge. There was a white frost over the 
fields, and all the battle-front was veiled by a mist which 
clung round the villages and farmsteads behind the lines 
and made a dense bank of gray fog below the rising 
ground. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 263 

This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little 
glinting stars burst continually over one spot, where the 
Bluff was hidden beyond Zillebeke Lake. When day- 
break came, with the rim of a red sun over a clump of 
trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of 
intensity like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy 
artillery were firing salvos. Field-guns, widely scattered, 
concentrated their fire upon one area, where their shells 
were bursting with a twinkle of light. Somewhere a 
machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato strokes, 
like an urgent knocking at the door. High overhead was 
the song of an airplane coming nearer, with a high, vibrant 
humming. It was an enemy searching through the mist 
down below him for any movement of troops or trains. 

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3d Division which at- 
tacked at four thirty-two that morning, and they were 
the Suffolks, Gordons, and King's Own Liverpools who 
led the assault, commanded by General Pratt. They 
flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a 
heavy barrage fire, smashing through broken belts of 
wire and stumbling in and out of shell-craters. The 
Germans, in their front-lines, had gone to cover in deep 
dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on the 
Bluff and its neighborhood during the previous ten days 
and nights. At first only a few men, not more than a 
hundred or so, could be discovered alive. The dead were 
thick in the maze of trenches, and our men stumbled 
across them. 

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed 
by the shell-fire, and cold with terror when our men 
sprang upon them in the darkness before dawn. Small 
parties were collected and passed back as prisoners — 
marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well 
as their lives after all that hell abo utthem. Hours later, 
when our battalions had stormed their way up other 
trenches into a salient jutting out of the German line 
and beyond the boundary of the objective that had been 
given to them, other living men were found to be still 



264 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be 
induced to come out. Terror kept them in those holes, 
and they were hke wild beasts at bay, still dangerous 
because they had their bombs and rifles. An ultimatum 
was shouted down to them by men too busy for persua- 
sive talk. "If you don't come out you'll be blown in." 
Some of them came out and others were blown to bits. 
After that the usual thing happened, the thing that in- 
evitably happened in all these little murderous attacks 
and counter-attacks. The enemy concentrated all its 
power of artillery on that position captured by our men, 
and day after day hurled over storms of shrapnel and 
high explosives, under which our men cowered until 
many were killed and more wounded. The first attack 
on the Bluff and its recapture cost us three thousand cas- 
ualties, and that was only the beginning of a daily toll of 
life and limbs in that neighborhood of hell. Through 
driving snowstorms shells went rushing across that battle- 
ground, ceaselessly in those first weeks of March, but the 
3d Division repulsed the enemy's repeated attacks in 
bombing fights which were very fierce on both sides. 

I went to General Pilcher's headquarters at Reninghelst 
on March 4th, and found the staff of the 17th Division 
frosty in their greeting, while General Pratt, the brigadier 
of the 3d Division, was conducting the attack in their 
new territory. General Pilcher himself was much shaken. 
The old gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bom- 
bardment had begun on his men. With Captain Rattnag 
his A. D. C. he lay for an hour in a ditch with shells 
screaming overhead and bursting close. More than once 
when I talked with him he raised his head and listened 
nervously and said: "Do you hear the guns? . . . They 
are terrible." 

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories 
on war and experimented in light-signals, as when one 
night I stood by his side in a dark field, and had a courteous 
old-fashioned dignity and gentleness of manner. He was 
a fine old English gentleman and a gallant soldier, but 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 265 

modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal for 
all those who hated its slaughter. 

Those men of the 3d Division — the "Iron Division," 
as it was called later in the war — remained in a hideous 
turmoil of wet earth up by the BlufF until other men came 
to relieve them and take over this corner of hell. 

What remained of the trenches was deep in water and 
filthy mud, where the bodies of many dead Germans lay 
under a litter of broken sand-bags and in the holes of 
half-destroyed dugouts. Nothing could be done to make 
it less horrible. Then the weather changed and became 
icily cold, with snow and rain. 

One dugout which had been taken for battalion head- 
quarters was six feet long by four wide, and here in this 
waterlogged hole lived three officers of the Royal Scots 
to whom a day or two before I had wished "good luck." 

The servants lived in the shaft alongside which was a 
place measuring four feet by four feet. There were no 
other dugouts where men could get any shelter from shells 
or storms, and the enemy's guns were never silent. 

But the men held on, as most of our men held on, with 
a resignation to fate and a stoic endurance beyond that 
ordinary human courage which we seemed to know before 
the war. 

The chaplain of this battalion had spent all the long 
night behind the lines, stoking fires and going round the 
cook-houses and looking at his wrist-watch to see how 
the minutes were crawling past. He had tea, rum, 
socks, oil, and food all ready for those who were coming 
back, and the lighted braziers were glowing red. 

At the appointed time the 'padre went out to meet 
his friends, pressing forward through the snow and list- 
ening for any sound of footsteps through the great 
hush. 

But there was no sound except the soft flutter of snow- 
flakes. He strained his eyes for any moving shadows of 
men. But there was only darkness and the falling snow. 



266 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Two hours passed, and they seemed endless to that young 
chaplain whose brain was full of frightful apprehensions, 
so that they were hours of anguish to him. 

Then at last the first men appeared. "I've never seen 
anything so splendid and so pitiful," said the man who 
had been waiting for them. 

They came along at about a mile an hour, sometimes 
in groups, sometimes by twos or threes, holding on to 
each other, often one by one. In this order they crept 
through the ruined villages in'the falling snow, which lay 
thick upon the masses of fallen masonry. There was a 
profound silence about them, and these snow-covered 
men were like ghosts walking through cities of death. 

No man spoke, for the sound of a human voice would 
have seemed a danger in this great white quietude. They 
were walking like old men, weak-kneed, and bent under 
the weight of their packs and rifles. 

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a 
cheery voice that hid the water in his heart every one 
had a word and a smile in reply, and made little jests 
about their drunken footsteps, for they were hke drunken 
men with utter weariness. 

*'What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?" was one man's 
joke. 

The last of those who came back — and there were 
many who never came back — were some hours later than 
the first company, having found it hard to crawl along 
that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place where the 
braziers were glowing. 

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was 
a hero, though his name will never be known in the his- 
tory of that silent and hidden war. And yet it was an 
ordinary episode, no degree worse in its hardship than 
what happened all along the line when there was an attack 
or counter-attack in foul weather. 

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very sim- 
ple men, should have "stuck it out" with that grandeur 
of courage which endured all things without self-interest 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 267 

and without emotion. They were unconscious of the 
virtue that was in them. 



XVII 

Going up to the Hne by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, 
I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing 
power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing 
intensity of gun-fire on both sides. 

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scat- 
tered thinly behind the lines and when our gunners had 
to be thrifty of shells, saving them up anxiously for hours 
of great need, when the SOS rocket shot up a green 
light from some battered trench upon which the enemy 
was concentrating "hate." 

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had 
to answer telephone messages calHng for help from bat- 
talions whose billets were being shelled to pieces by long- 
range howitzers, or from engineers whose working-parties 
were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from 
a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether 
the artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was 
enfilading a certain trench and piHng up the casualties. 
It was hard to say: "Sorry! . . . We've got to go slow with 
ammunition." 

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the 
fields had grown a new crop of British batteries. Month 
after month our weight of metal increased, and while 
the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate the 
"heavies" had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper 
and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which 
rolled over the battlefields by day and night. 

There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, 
and no longer the same need for thrift when there was 
urgent need for artillery support. RetaHation was the 
order of the day, and if the enemy asked for trouble by 
any special show of "hate" he got it quickly and with a 
double dose. 



268 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance 
of Hfe, except in places where, as in the saHent, the Ger- 
man observers stared down at them from high ground 
and saw every gun flash and registered every battery. 
Going round the saHent one day with General Burstall — 
and a very good name, too! — who was then the Canadian 
gunner-general, I was horrified at the way in which the 
enemy had the accurate range of our guns and gun-pits 
and knocked them out with deadly shooting. 

Here and there our amateur gunners — quick to learn 
their job — found a good place, and were able to camou- 
flage their position for a time, and give praise to the 
little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later they were 
discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were 
not caught too soon. 

So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond 
Kemmel village, where I went to see a boy who had once 
been a rising hope of Fleet Street. 

He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it 
— that was before his men were blown to bits around him 
and he was sent down as a tragic case of shell-shock — ■ 
and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he 
chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it 
topping. His bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by 
the scene around him. He walked in a jaunty, boyish 
way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant 
place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been 
blown to bits, except where, on the outskirts, the chateau 
with its racing-stables remained untouched — "German 
spies!" said the boy — and where a little grotto to Our 
Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was 
battered and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits 
in the churchyard and open vaults where old dead had 
been tumbled out of their tombs. We walked along a 
sunken road and then to a barn in open fields. The roof 
was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on 
wet days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the 
room above the ladder where the officers had their mess. 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT '269 

There were some home-made chairs up there, and Klrch- 
ner prints of naked Httle ladies were tacked up to the 
beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace 
where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let down 
at night. A gramophone played merry music and gave 
a homelike touch to this parlor in war. 

"A good spot!" I said. "Is it well hidden?" 

"As safe as houses," said the captain of the battery.* 
"Touching wood, I mean." 

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on 
trestles, and at those words five young men rose with a 
look of fright on their faces and embraced the beam 
supporting the roof of the barn. 

"What's happened?" I asked, not having heard the 
howl of a shell. 

"Nothing," said the boy, "except touching wood. 
The captain spoke too loudly." 

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shoot- 
ing, and found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the 
grim desolation of the battlefield, all white after a morn- 
ing's snowstorm, except where the broken walls of dis- 
tant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill 
showed black as ink. 

The gunners could not see their target, which had been 
given to them through the telephone, but they knew it 
by the figures giving the angle of fire. 

"It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench," said 
a bright-eyed boy by my side (he was one of the rising 
hopes of Fleet Street before he became a gunner officer 
in Flanders). "With any luck we shall get 'em in the neck, 
and I like to hear the Germans squeal. . . . And my gun's 
ready first, as usual." 

The officer commanding shouted through a tin mega- 
phone, and the battery fired, each gun following its brother 
at a second interval, with the staccato shock of a field-piece, 
which is more painful than the dull roar of a "heavy." 

A word came along the wire from the officer in the 
observation post a mile away. 



270 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece. 

'^Repeat!" 

"We've got 'em," said the young gentleman by my side, 
in a cheerful way. 

The officer with the megaphone looked across and 
smiled. / 

"We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like 
it a bit." 

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as 
the four guns fired together. "Repeat!" came the high 
voice through the megaphone. 

The still air was rent again. ... In a waterlogged 
trench, which we could not see, a German pumping-party 
had been blown to bits. 

The artillery officers took turns in the observation 
posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind 
the front trench instead of in the billet below. 

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little 
vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts 
of the communication trenches slithered down under the 
weight of sand-bags. 

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and 
eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach 
before he reached his lookout station from which he 
looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once 
there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct 
hit from above or a little mining operation underneath. 

He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather 
a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side 
up and found a dead Frenchman there), and smoked Bel- 
gian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat there very 
solitary and watchful. 

The rats worried him a little — they were bold enough 
to bare their teeth when they met him down a trench, 
and there was one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romped 
round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night. But 
these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress 
to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 271 

human targets to kill . . . until one day, as I have said, 
everything snapped in him and the boy was broken. 

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day 
that I met a queer apparition through a heavy snow- 
storm» It was a French civilian in evening dress — boiled 
shirt, white tie, and all — with a bowler hat bent to the 
storm. 

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and 
shook his head. 

"It isn't true," he said. "1 don't believe it. . . . We're 
mad, that's all! . . . The whole world is mad, so why 
should we be sane?" 

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of 
Kemmel, to the noise of gun-fire, in evening dress, with- 
out an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow. 

A little farther down the road we passed a signboard 
on the edge of a cratered field. New words had been 
painted on it in good Roman letters. 

Cimetiere reserve 

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely 
and turned to me with a world of meaning in his eyes. 
Then he tapped his forehead and laughed. 

"Mad!" he said. "We're all mad!" 



XVIII 

In that winter of discontent there was one great body 
of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing 
no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and 
barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were "bunk- 
ered" forever, and that all their training and tradition 
were made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and 
again, when the infantry was hard pressed, as in the 
second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos, they were 
called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in 
the trenches, and then they came back again, less some 



272 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

of their comrades, into dirty billets remote from the 
fighting-lines, to exercise their horses and curse the war. 

Before they went into the line in February of 'i6 I 
went to see some of those cavalry officers to wish them 
good luck, and saw them in the trenches and afterward 
when they came out. In the headquarters of a squadron 
of "Royals" — the way in was by a ladder through the 
window — billeted in a village, which on a day of frost 
looked as quaint and pretty as a Christmas card, was a 
party of officers typical of the British cavalry as a whole. 

A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked 
on to the walls to remind them of the arts and graces of 
an older mode of life, and to keep them human by the 
sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a pretty girl again!). 

Now they were going to change this cottage for the 
trenches, this quiet village with a church-bell chiming 
every hour, for the tumult in the battle-front — this abso- 
lute safety for the immediate menace of death. They 
knew already the beastliness of life in trenches. They 
had no illusions about "glory." But they were glad to 
go, because activity was better than inactivity, and be- 
cause the risk would give them back their pride, and 
because the cavalry should fight anyhow and somehow, 
even if a charge or a pursuit were denied them. 

They had a hot time in the trenches. The enemy's 
artillery was active, and the list of casualties began to 
tot up. A good officer and a fine fellow was killed almost 
at the outset, and men were horribly wounded. But all 
those troopers showed a cool courage. 

Things looked bad for a few minutes when a section of 
trenches was blown in, isolating one platoon from another. 
A sergeant-major made his way back from the damaged 
section, and a young officer who was going forward to 
find out the extent of damage met him on the way. 

"Can I get through?" asked the officer. 

"I've got through," was the answer, "but it's chancing 
one's luck." 

The officer "chanced his luck," but did not expect to 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 273 

come back alive. Afterward he tried to analyze his feel- 
ings for my benefit. 

"I had no sense of fear," he said, "but a sort of sub- 
conscious knowledge that the odds were against me if I 
went on, and yet a conscious determination to go on at 
all costs and find out what had happened." 

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In 
spite of all the unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he 
had the heart to smile when in the middle of the night 
one of the sergeants approached him with an amiable 
suggestion. 

"Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make 
a slight attack upon the enemy.?" 

There was something in those words, "a slight attack," 
which is irresistibly comic to any of us who know the con- 
ditions of modern trench war. But they were not spoken 
in jest. 

So the cavalry did its "bit" again, though not as 
cavalry, and I saw some of them when they came back, 
and they were glad to have gone through that bloody 
business so that no man might fling a scornful word as 
they passed with their horses. 

"It is queer," said my friend, "how we go from this 
place of peace to the battlefield, and then come back for 
a spell before going up again. It is like passing from one 
life to another." 

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. 
Those officers belonged to the old families of England, 
the old caste of aristocracy, but the foul outrage of the 
war — the outrage against all ideals of civilization — had 
made them think, some of them for the first time, about 
the structure of social hfe and of the human family. 

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but 
they looked deeper than that and saw how the leaders of 
all great nations in Europe had maintained the philosophy 
of forms and had built up hatreds and fears and alHances 
over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with 
passion or duped with lies. 



274 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"The politicians are the guilty ones," said one cavalry 
officer. "I am all for revolution after this bloody mas- 
sacre. I would hang all politicians, diplomats, and so- 
called statesmen with strict impartiality." 

"I'm for the people," said another. "The poor, bloody 
people, who are kept in ignorance and then driven into 
the shambles when their rulers desire to grab some new 
part of the earth's surface or to get their armies going 
because they are bored with peace." 

"What price Christianity.?" asked another, inevitably. 
"What have the churches done to stop war or preach the 
gospel of Christ? The Bishop of London, the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, all those conventional, patriotic, cannon- 
blessing, banner-baptizing humbugs. God! They make 
me tired!" 

Strange words to hear in a cavalry mess! Strange 
turmoil in the souls of men! They were the same words 
I had heard from London boys in Ypres, spoken just as 
crudely. But many young gentlemen who spoke those 
words have already forgotten them or would deny them. 

XIX 

The winter of 191 5-16 passed with its misery, and 
spring came again to France and Flanders with its prom- 
ise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of wild flowers and the 
green of leaves where the earth was not made barren by 
the fire of war and all trees killed. 

For men there was no promise of life, but only new 
preparations for death, and continued killing. 

The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France 
had saved herself from a mortal blow at the heart by a 
desperate, heroic resistance which cost her five hundred 
and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On the British 
front there were still no great battles, but those trench 
raids, artillery duels, mine fighting, and small massacres 
which filled the casualty clearing stations with the aver- 
age amount of human wreckage. The British armies were 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 275 

- 

being held in leash for a great offensive in the summer. 
New divisions were learning the lessons of the old divisions, 
and here and there generals were doing a little fancy work 
to keep things merry and bright. 

So it was when some mines were exploded under the 
German earthworks on the lower slopes of the Vimy 
Ridge, where the enemy had already blown several mines 
and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain 
those craters, and new ones to be made by our mine 
charges, that the 74th Brigade of the 25th Division, a 
body of Lancashire men, the 9th Loyal North Lanca- 
shires and the nth Royal Fusiliers, with a company of 
Royal Engineers and some Welsh pioneers, were detailed 
for the perilous adventure of driving in the mine shafts, 
putting tremendous charges of high explosives in the sap- 
heads, and rushing the German positions. 

It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of 
wet and cloudy weather preventing the enemy's observa- 
tion, that our heavy artillery fired a short number of 
rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts. A few 
minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a 
terrific roar and blew in two of the five old German 
craters. After the long rumble of heaving earth had 
been stilled there was just time enough to hear the stac- 
cato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second 
roar and a wild upheaval of soil when the left group of 
mines destroyed two more of the German craters and 
knocked out the machine-gun. 

The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the 
men were ready. The first to get away were two lieu- 
tenants of the 9th Loyal North Lancashires, who rushed 
forward with their assaulting-parties to the remaining 
crater on the extreme left, which had not been blown up. 

With little opposition from dazed and terror-strict en 
Germans, bayoneted as they scrambled out of the chaotic 
earth, our men flung themselves into those smoking pits 
and were followed immediately by working-parties, who 
built up bombing posts with earth and sand-bags on the 



276 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

crater lip and began to dig out communication trenches 
leading to them. The assaulting-parties of the Lanca- 
shire Fusiliers were away at the first signal, and were 
attacking the other groups of craters under heavy fire. 

The Germans were shaken with terror because the 
explosion of the mines had killed and wounded a large 
number of them, and through the darkness there rang out 
the cheers of masses of men who were out for blood. 
Through the darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, 
flooding all that turmoil of earth and men with a vivid, 
red illumination, as flare after flare rose high into the sky 
from several points of the German line. Later the red 
lights died down, and then other rockets were fired, giving 
a green light to this scene of war. 

The German gunners were now at work in answer to 
those beacons of distress, and with every caliber of gun 
from howitzers to minenwerfers they shelled our front-lines 
for two hours and killed for vengeance. They were too 
late to stop the advance of the assaulting troops, who 
were fighting in the craters against groups of German 
bombers who tried to force their way up to the rescue 
of a position already lost. One of our officers leading 
the assault on one of the craters on the right was killed 
very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with 
individual resolution and initiative, and the grit of the 
Lancashire man in a tight place, fought on grimly, and 
won their purpose. 

A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after 
he had directed his men to their posts from the lip of a 
new mine-crater, as coolly as though he were a master of 
ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom. Another, a cham- 
pion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung 
his hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and 
with a fierce contempt of death. Until he was killed by an 
answering shot. The N. C. O.'s took up the command 
and the men "carried on" until they held all the chain of 
craters, crouching and panting above mangled men. 

They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT '277 

lay wounded and half buried, or quite buried, in the chaos 
of earth made by those mine-craters now doubly up- 
heaved. Their screams and moans sounding above the 
guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of 
earth, which kept them prisoners in deep pits below the 
crater lips, and awful inarticulate noises of human pain 
coming out of that lower darkness beyond the light of the 
rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our men 
could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted 
across to the German grenadiers: 

"We will cease fire if you will, and let you get in your 
wounded, . . . Cease fire for the wounded!" 

The shout was repeated, and our bombers held their 
hands, still waiting for an answer. But the answer was a 
new storm of bombs, and the fighting went on, and the 
moaning of the men who were helpless and unhelped. 

Working-parties followed up the assault to "consoli- 
date" the position. They did amazing things, toiling in 
the darkness under abominable shell-fire, and by daylight 
had built communication trenches with head-cover from 
the crater lips to our front-line trenches. 

But now it was the enemy's turn — ^the turn of his guns, 
which poured explosive fire into those pits, churning up 
the earth again, mixing it with new flesh and blood, and 
carving up his own dead; and it was the turn of his 
bombers, who followed this fire in strong assaults upon 
the Lancashire lads, who, lying among their killed and 
wounded, had to repel those fierce attacks. 

On May 17th I went to see General Doran of the 25th 
Division, an optimistic old gentleman who took a bright 
view of things, and Colonel Crosby, who was acting- 
brigadier of the 74th Brigade, which had made the attack. 
He, too, was enthusiastic about the situation, though his 
brigade had suffered eight hundred casualties in a month 
of routine warfare. 

In my simple way I asked him a direct question: 

"Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, 
sir?" 



278 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Colonel Crosby stared at me sternly. 

*' Certainly. The position cannot be retaken over- 
ground. We hold it strongly." 

As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small 
farmhouse), saluted, and handed him a pink slip, which 
was a telephone message. I watched him read it, and 
saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed how the 
room shook with the constant reverberation of distant 
gun-fire. A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy 
way. 

"Excuse me,'* said the colonel; "things seem to be hap- 
pening, I must go at once." 

He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a 
look of bad tidings went with him. 

His men had been blown out of the craters. 

A staflF-officer sat in the brigade ojHice, and when the 
acting-brigadier had gone raised his head and looked 
across to me. 

*'I am a critic of these affairs," he said. "They seem 
to me too expensive. But I'm here to do what I am told." 

We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year after- 
ward, when the Canadians and Scottish captured all the 
Vimy Ridge in a great assault. 

XX 

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had 
come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this 
side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry 
of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden oriole 
were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightin- 
gale sang as though no war were near its love, and at 
broad noonday a million larks rose above the tall wheat 
with a great high chorus of glad notes. 

Among the British armies there was hope again, im- 
mense faith that believed once more in an ending to the 
war, Verdun had been saved. The enemy had been 
slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 279 

said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had 
ever been, in men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and 
all material of war, were going to be launched in a great 
offensive. No more trench warfare. No more dying in 
ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit 
(Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be 
"The Great Push." The last battles were to be fought 
before the year died again, though many men would die 
before that time. 

Up in the salient something happened to make men 
question the weakness of the enemy, but the news did 
not spread very far and there was a lot to do elsewhere, 
on the Somme, where the sahent seemed a long way off. 
It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was 
an ugly thing. 

On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened 
upon their lines in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, 
beyond the lines of Ypres, and tragedy befell them. I 
went to see those who lived through it and stood in the 
presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of 
that hell which had been invented by human beings out 
of the earth's chemistry, and yet had kept their reason. 

The enemy's bombardment began suddenly, with one 
great crash of guns, at half past eight on Friday morning. 
Generals Mercer and WiUiams had gone up to inspect 
the trenches at six o'clock in the morning. 

It had been almost silent along the lines when the 
enemy's batteries opened fire with one enormous thunder- 
stroke, which was followed by continuous salvos. The 
shells came from nearly every point of the compass- 
north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was 
over our men again. 

In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess 
Patricia's Light Infantry, with some battalions of the 
Royal Canadian Regiment south of them, and some of 
the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been dis- 
mounted), and units from another Canadian division at 



28o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the extreme end of their Hne of front. It was those men 
who had to suffer the tempest of the enemy's shells. 

Earth below them opened up into great craters as high- 
explosive shells burst continually, flinging up masses of 
soil, flattening out breastworks and scattering sand-bags 
into dust. 

Canadians in the front trenches held on in the midst 
of this uproar. "They took it all," said one of the 
officers, and in that phrase, spoken simply by a man 
who was there, too, lies the spirit of pride and sacrifice. 
"They took it all" and did not budge, though the sky 
seemed to be opening above them and the earth below 
them. 

The bombardment continued without a pause for five 
hours, by which time most of our front trenches had been 
annihilated. At about a quarter past one the enemy's 
guns lifted a little, and through the dense smoke-clouds 
which made a solid bar across No Man's Land appeared 
a mass of German infantry. They wore their packs and 
full field-kit, as though they had come to stay. 

Perhaps they expected that no one lived in the British 
trenches, and it was a reasonable idea, but wrong. There 
were brave men remaining there, alive and determined 
to fight. Although the order for retirement had been 
given, single figures here and there were seen to get over 
the broken parapets and go forward to meet the enemy 
halfway. They died to a man, fighting. It seemed to 
me one of the most pitiful and heroic things of this war, 
that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of 
them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain 
death to oppose the enemy's advance. 

From the network of trenches behind, not altogether 
smashed, there was time for men to retire to a second line 
of defense, if they were still unwounded and had strength 
to go. An officer — Captain Grossman — in command of 
one of these support companies, brought several men out 
of a trench, but did not follow on. He turned again, 
facing the enemy, and was last seen — " a big, husky man," 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 



281 



says one of his comrades — as he fired his revolver and then 
flung it into a German's face. 

Colonel Shaw of the ist Battalion, C. M. R., rallied 
eighty men out of the Cumberland dugouts, and died 
fighting. The Germans were kept at bay for some time, 
but they flung their bombs into the square of men, so that 
very few remained alive. When only eight were still 
fighting among the bodies of their comrades these tat- 
tered and blood-splashed men, standing there fiercely 
contemptuous of the enemy and death, were ordered to 
retire by Major Palmer, the last officer among them. 

Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm 
in spite of the shell-fire, which raged above them also, 
and it was against this second line of Canadians that the 
German infantry came up — and broke. 

In the center the German thrust was hard toward 
Zillebeke Lake. Here some of the Canadian Rifles 
were in support, and as soon as the infantry attack 
began they were ordered forward to meet and check the 
enemy. An officer in command of one of their battalions 
afterward told me that he led his men across country to 
Maple Copse under such a fire as he had never seen. 
Because of the comrades in front, in dire need of help, no 
notice was taken as the wounded fell, but the others 
pressed on as fast as they could go. 

Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted 
and awaited the enemy with another battalion who were 
already holding this wood of six or seven acres. When 
the German troops arrived they may have expected to 
meet no great resistance. They met a withering fire, 
which caused them bloody losses. The Canadians had 
assembled at various points, which became strongholds 
of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and the 
men held their fire until the enemy was within close 
range, so that they worked havoc among them. But the 
German guns never ceased and many Canadians fell. 
Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian Parliament, 
fell with a piece of shell in his lung. 



282 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and 
poured out shells. The edge of the salient was swept 
with fire, and, though the Canadian losses were frightful, 
the Germans suffered also, so that the battlefield was one 
great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought 
back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were 
supreme in devotion. They worked in and out across 
that shell-swept ground hour after hour through the day 
and night, rescuing many stricken men at a great cost 
in hfe to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only 
five remained alive. "No one can say," said one of their 
officers, "that the Canadians do not know how to die." 

No one would deny that. 

Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade 
their casualties were twenty-two hundred. 

There were 151 survivors from the ist Battalion Cana- 
dian Mounted Rifles, 130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 
from the 5th, 520 from the 2d. Those are the figures of 
massacre. 

Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. 
Their own guns were but a small part of the huge orchestra 
of "heavies" and field batteries which played the devil's 
tattoo upon the German positions in our old trenches. It 
was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure 
the same experience as their guns had given to Canadian 
troops on the same ground. Trenches already battered 
were smashed again. The earth, which was plowed with 
shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our 
shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches. 

The Canadian troops charged at two o'clock in the 
morning. Their attack was directed to the part of the 
hne from the southern end of Sanctuary Wood to Mount 
Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood, Ob- 
servatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself. 

The attack went quickly and the men expected greater 
trouble. The enemy's shell-fire was heavy, but the Cana- 
dians got through under cover of their own guns, which 
had lengthened their fuses a little and continued an in- 



A WINTER OF DISCONTENT 283 

tense bombardment behind the enemy's first line. The 
men advanced in open order and worked downward and 
southward into their old positions. 

In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought 
desperately, were killed almost to a man, just as Colonel 
Shaw had died on June 2d with his party of eighty men 
who had rallied round him. It was one shambles for 
another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems. 

One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surren- 
dered. The officer was glad to escape from the death to 
which he had resigned himself when our bombardment 
began. 

*'I knew how it would be," he said. "We had orders 
to take this ground, and took it; but we knew you would 
come back again. You had to do so. So here I am." 

Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. 
In one place the stores which had been buried by the 
Canadians before they left were still there, untouched by 
the enemy. Our bombardment had made it impossible 
for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold 
the line steady. 

They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, 
in shell-holes and craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, 
and had been pounded there. The Canadians were back 
again. 



, Part Five 

THE HEART 
OF A CITY 



AMIENS IN TIME OF WAR 



DURING the battles of the Somme in 19 16, and 
afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the 
abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of 
the British army. When the battles began in July of 
that year it was only a short distance away from the 
fighting-lines; near enough to hear the incessant roar of 
gun-fire on the French front and ours, and near enough to 
get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty minutes, 
to places where men were being killed or maimed or 
blinded in the routine of the day's work. One went out 
past Amiens station and across a little stone bridge which 
afterward, in the enemy's advance of 1918, became the 
mark for German high velocities along the road to Quer- 
rieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the 
Fourth Army in an old chateau with pleasant meadows 
round it and a stream meandering through fields of but- 
tercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village of 
Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster 
fell oflp in blotches as the war went on, we went along the 
straight highroad to Albert, through the long and strag- 
gling village of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in 
reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women and 
played solemn games with *'the bairns"; and so, past 
camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly 
red-brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head down- 
ward from the broken tower of the church with her Babe 
outstretched above the fields of death as though as a 
peace-offering to this world at war. 

One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men 



288 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

blown to bits there the day after the battles of the Somme 
began. It was in the road that turned to the right, past 
the square to go to Meaulte and on to Fricourt. There 
was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road, bring- 
ing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing 
without a pause over Fricourt and Mametz. The high 
scream of a shell came through a blue sky and ended on 
its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few min- 
utes the transport column was held up while a mass of 
raw flesh which a second before had been two living men 
and their horses was cleared out of the way. Then the 
gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road, raising 
a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the curses of 
the drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear. 

I went through Albert many scores of times to the 
battlefields beyond, and watched its process of disinte- 
gration through those years, until it was nothing but a 
wild scrap heap of red brick and twisted iron, and, in the 
last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which 
had seemed to escape all shell-fire by miraculous, powers, 
lay buried beneath a mass of masonry. Beyond were the 
battlefields of the Somme where every yard of ground 
is part of the great graveyard of our youth. 

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the 
red heart of war, and was near enough to the lines to be 
crowded always with officers and men who came out be- 
tween one battle and another, and by "lorry-jumping" 
could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, ac- 
cording to their views of civilization. To these men — 
boys, mostly — ^who had been living in lousy ditches under 
hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with little hells for those 
who liked them. There were hotels in which they could 
go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck 
to be early on the list. There were streets of shops with 
plate-glass windows unbroken, shining, beautiful. There 
were well-dressed women walking about, with kind eyes, 
and children as dainty, some of them, as in High Street, 
Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young 



THE HEART OF A CITY 289 

officers, who had plenty of money to spend — because 
there was no chance of spending money between a row 
of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men 
were plastered into the parapet — invaded the shops and 
bought fancy soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocket- 
books, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous price), 
khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the 
latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of 
spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made 
them go frorh one shop to another in search of things they 
could carry back to the line — that and the lure of girls 
behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who 
understood their execrable French, even English spoken 
with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five 
minutes with any group of young fighting-men — who 
broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry of some 
Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and 
paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering 
out some foolish sentiment in broken French, blushing 
to the roots of their hair (though captains and heroes) 
at their own temerity with a girl who, in another five 
minutes, would play the same part in the same scene 
with a different group of boys. 

I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How 
bored they must have been with all this flirtation, which 
led to nothing except, perhaps, the purchase of a bit of 
soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these 
boys would have to go back to the trenches in a few hours 
and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few 
days. There could be no romantic episode, save of a 
transient kind, between them and these good-looking lads 
in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to 
them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, 
and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, bru- 
tality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls 
of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in 
war not to know the realities. They knew the risks of 
transient love and they were not taking them — unless 



290 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

conditions were very favorable. They attended strictly 
to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, 
and were, I think, mostly good girls — as virtuous as life 
in war-time may let girls be — ^wise beyond their years, 
and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers 
who tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing 
that many of them were doomed to die for France and 
England. They had their own lovers — boys in blue 
somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns- 
weilerkopf — and apart from occasional intimacies with 
English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, 
left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the 
streets. 

II 

The Street of the Three Pebbles — la rue des Trois 
Cailloux — which goes up from the station through the 
heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were 
the best shops — the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, 
where all day long officers down from the line came in 
to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with 
friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not 
because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of clean- 
liness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the 
desolate fields; then the booksellers' (Madame Carpen- 
tier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not only 
the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying sta- 
tionery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals 
who spoke good French and bought good books and liked 
ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Ma- 
dame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, 
when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) 
She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would 
have seen her own son dead a hundred times — he was a 
soldier in Saloniki — rather than that France should make 
a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in 
Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, 
when the French army passed through in retreat from 



THE HEART OF A CITY 291 

Bapaume, and she and the people of her city knew for 
the first time that the Germans were close upon them. 
She stood in the crowd as I did — in the darkness, watch- 
ing that French column pass with their transport, and 
their wounded lying on the baggage wagons, men of many 
regiments mixed up, the light of the street lamps shining 
on the casques of cuirassiers with their long horsehair 
tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers, 
hunched under their packs, marching silently with drag- 
ging steps. Once in a while one of the soldiers left the 
ranks and came on to the sidewalk, whispering to a group 
of dark shadows. The crowds watched silently, in a 
curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman 
near me spoke in a low voice, and said, "Nous sommes 
perdus!" Those were the only words I heard or re- 
membered. 

That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new 
class were being hurried away in truck trains, and while 
their army was in retreat sang "La Marseillaise," as 
though victory were in their hearts. Next day the 
German army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten 
days afterward passed through it on the way to Paris. 
Madame Carpentier told me of the first terror of the peo- 
ple when the field-gray men came down the Street of the 
Three Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling 
oranges fainted when a German stretched out his hand 
to buy some. Women hid behind their counters when 
German boots stamped into their shops. But Madame 
Carpentier was not afraid. She knew the Germans and 
their language. She spoke frank words to German officers, 
who saluted her respectfully enough. "You will never 
get to Paris. . . . France and England will be too strong 
for you. . . . Germany will be destroyed before this war 
ends." They laughed at her and said: "We shall be in 
Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, 
Madame?" Madame Carpentier was haughty with 
them. Some women of Amiens — poor drabs — did not 
show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy 



292 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

who crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. 
A girl told me that she was looking through the window 
of a house that faced the Place de la Gare, and saw a 
number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-organ 
which was playing to them. They were dancing with 
women of the town, who were laughing and screeching 
in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The girl who was 
watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very 
little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there 
was something in this scene degrading to womanhood 
and to France. She turned from the window and flung 
herself on her bed and wept bitterly. . . . 

I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and 
then with Madame and Mademoiselle Carpentier, while 
a crowd of officers came in and out. Madame was always 
merry and bright in spite of her denunciations of the 
"Sale Boches — les brigands, les bandits!'' and Mademoiselle 
put my knowledge of French to a severe but pleasant 
test. She spoke with alarming rapidity, her words 
tumbling over one another in a cascade of volubility de- 
lightful to hear but difficult to follow. She had a strong 
mind — masterly in her methods of business — so that she 
could serve six customers at once and make each one 
think that her attention was entirely devoted to his needs 
— and a very shrewd and critical idea of military strategy 
and organization. She had but a poor opinion of British 
generals and generalship, although a wholehearted ad- 
miration for the gallantry of British officers and men; 
and she had an intimate knowledge of our preparations, 
plans, failures, and losses. French liaison-officers con- 
fided to her the secrets of the British army; and English 
officers trusted her with many revelations of things "in 
the wind." But Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion 
and loyalty and did not repeat these things to people 
who had no right to know. She would have been far 
more efficient as a staff-officer than many of the young 
gentlemen with red tabs on their tunics who came into 
the shop, flipping beautiful top-boots with riding-crops. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 293 

sitting on the counter, and turning over the pages of 
La Vie for the latest convention in ladies' legs. 

Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told 
me, but her musical studies were seriously interrupted by 
business and air raids, which one day ceased in Amiens 
altogether after a night of horror, when hundreds of 
houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and 
the Germans brought their guns close to the city — close 
enough to scatter high velocities about its streets — and 
the population came up out of their cellars, shaken by 
the terror of the night, and fled. I passed the bookshop 
where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this 
house which had escaped by greater luck than its neigh- 
bors. She turned as I passed and raised her hand with 
a grave gesture of resignation and courage. ''Us ne 
passeront pas!" she said. It was the spirit of the courage 
of French womanhood which spoke in those words. 



Ill 

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street 
of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down 
for two years before then by the British armies on the 
Somme, with the French on their right. I was never 
tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst 
of them, and studying their types. All the types of 
young English manhood came down this street, and some 
of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, espe- 
cially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four 
months or more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of 
hunted look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter. 
They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or 
strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to 
the right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as ex- 
pressionless as masks. To-morrow or the next day, per- 
haps, the Hunter would track them down. Other English 
officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of 

nerve-control, although the psychologist would have de- 
20 



294 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

tected disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of 
hilarity with which they greeted their friends, in gusts of 
laughter, for no apparent cause, at "CharHe's bar," where 
they would drink three cocktails apiece on an empty 
stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as 
things that were very funny. They dined and wined in 
Amiens at the "Rhin," the "Godebert," or the "Cathe- 
drale," with a kind of spiritual exaltation in good food 
and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that 
this might be their last dinner in life, with good pals 
about them. They wanted to make the best of it — and 
damn the price. In that spirit many of them went after 
other pleasures — down the bi^ways of the city, and 
damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who 
blames them.? It was war that was to blame, and those 
who made war possible. 

Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and 
down, went Enghsh, and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, 
and Canadian, and Australian, and New Zealand fighting- 
men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats all 
splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, 
chalky mud of the Somme battlefields, and their top- 
boots and puttees were plastered with this mud, and their 
faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive or a tramp 
down from the line. The rain beat with a metalHc tattoo 
on their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden. 

French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night 
on their way to some other part of the front, jostled 
among British soldiers, and their packs were a wonder 
to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots 
and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, 
and packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life 
in the desert of the battlefields beyond civilization. 
They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low 
over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means 
of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen- 
looking and resentful of Enghsh soldiers walking or 
talking with French cocottes. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 29S 

IV 

I saw a scene "with a French poilu one day in the Street 
of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, 
when the French troops were fighting on our right from 
Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was Hke a scene 
from "Gaspard." The poilu was a middle-aged man, and 
very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a 
low cafe down by the river. In the High Street he was 
noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the war to 
happen, and the French government for having sen- 
tenced him and all poor sacre poilus to rot to death 
in the trenches, away from their wives and children, 
without a thought for them; and nothing but treachery 
in Paris: 

"Nous sommes trahis!" said the man, raising his arms. 
"For the hundredth time France is betrayed." 

A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken 
denunciations. No one laughed. They stared at him 
with a kind of pitying wonderment. An agent de police 
pushed his way between the people and caught hold of 
the soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The 
crowd murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, 
finding himself in the hands of the police, on this one day 
out of the trenches — after five months — flung himself on 
the pavement in a passion of tears and supplication. 

Je suis pere de famille! . . . Je suis un soldat de 
France! . . . Dans les tranchees pour cinq mois! . . . 
Quest-ce que mes camarades vont dire, 'ere nom de Dieu? et 
man capitaine? C'est emmordant apres toute ma service 
comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi done, mon vieux!" 
^^Viens done, saligaud,'^ growled the agent de police. 

The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs 
rose to violent protest on behalf of the poilu. 

^'C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les 
tranchees! C'est affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour- 
quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur le front qu*est'Ce que cela 
signifie? Qa rCa aucune importance!" 



296 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

A dandy French ojfficer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into 
the center of the scene and tapped the poHceman on the 
shoulder. 

"Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? 
Sacred name of God, don't you know that a man like this 
has helped to save France, while you pigs stand at street 
corners watching petticoats?" 

He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand 
straight. 

" Be oflp with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble 
for you." 

He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said: 

*'Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu 
etoile. 

The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for 
the drunken soldier of France. 



Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois 
Cailloux, beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during 
the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy 
men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, 
and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of 
their big, coarse hands. They ordered two ''little 
glasses" and drank them at one gulp. Then two more. 

"See what I have got, my little cabbage,"' said one of 
them, stooping to the heavy pack which he had shifted 
from his shoulders to the other seat beside him. "It is 
something to make you laugh." 

"And what is that, my old one?" said a woman sitting 
on the other side of the marble-topped table, with another 
woman of her own class, from the market nearby. 

The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into 
his pack, laughing a little in a self-satisfied way. 

"I killed a German to get it," he said. "He was a pig 
of an officer, a dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like 
a schoolboy." 



THE HEART OF A CITY 297 

One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her 
eyes gUstened. 

"Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I'd like 
to get my fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!" 

"I finished him with a grenade," said the poilu. "It 
was good enough. It knocked a hole in him as large as 
a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It will make you 
smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh ? " 

He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with 
a blotch of reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could 
hardly undo the little clasp. 

"He wore this next his heart," said the man. "Per- 
haps he thought it would bring him luck. But I killed 
him all the same! 'Cre nom de Dieu!" 

He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the 
flap of the pouch. 

"It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps 
even now she doesn't know he's dead. She thinks of him 
wearing this next to his heart. 'Cre nom de Dieu! It 
was I that killed him a week ago!" 

He held up something in his hand, and the light through 
the estaminet window gleamed on it. It was a woman's 
lock of hair, like fine-spun gold. 

The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then 
screamed with laughter. One of them tried to grab the 
hair, but the poilu held it high, beyond her reach, with a 
gruff command of, "Hands off!" Other soldiers and 
women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the 
yellow tress, laughing, making ribald conjectures as to 
the character of the woman from whose head it had come. 
They agreed that she was fat and ugly, like all German 
women, and a foul slut. 

"She'll never kiss that fellow again,'* said one man. 
"Our old one has cut the throat oithat pig of a Boche!" 

"I'd like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off 
her back," said one of the women. "The dirty drab with 
yellow hair! They ought to be killed, every one of them, 
so that the human race should be rid of them!'* 



298 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow," said the other 
woman. "A bit of dirt, as our poilus will do for all of 
them." 

The soldier with the woman's hair in his hand stroked 
it across his forefinger. 

"All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of 
the woman, sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German 
girl I kissed in Paris — a dancing-girl!" 

There was a howl of laughter from the two women. 

*'The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the Ger- 
man cow!" 

*'I will keep it as a mascot," said the poilu, scrunching 
it up and thrusting it into his pouch. "It '11 keep me 
in mind of that saligaud of a German officer I killed. 
He was a chic fellow, tout de meme. A boy." 

VI 

Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles 
with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having 
come down from Pozieres, where it was always hell in the 
days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of them, 
dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes 
in winter — these gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for 
discipline's sake, but desperate fighters, as simple as chil- 
dren in their ways of thought and speech (except for 
frightful oaths), and looking at life, this fife of war and 
this life in Amiens, with frank, curious eyes, and a kind of 
humorous contempt for death, and disease, and English 
Tommies, and French girls, and "the whole damned 
show," as they called it. They were lawless except for 
the laws to which their souls gave allegiance. They be- 
haved as the equals of all men, giving no respect to 
generals or staff-officers or the devils of hell. There was 
a primitive spirit of manhood in them, and they took 
what they wanted, and were ready to pay for it in coin 
or in disease or in wounds. They had no conceit of them- 
selves in a little, vain way, but they reckoned themselves 



THE HEART OF A CITY 299 

the only fighting-men, simply, and without boasting. 
They were hard as steel, and finely tempered. Some of 
them were ruffians, but most of them were, I imagine, like 
those English yeomen who came into France with the 
Black Prince, men who lived "rough," close to nature, of 
sturdy independence, good-humored, though fierce in a 
fight, and ruthless. That is how they seemed to me, in 
a general way, though among them were boys of a more 
dehcate fiber, and sensitive, if one might judge by their 
clear-cut features and wistful eyes. They had money to 
spend beyond the dreams of our poor Tommy. Six shil- 
lings and sixpence a day and remittances from home. So 
they pushed open the doors of any restaurant in Amiens 
and sat down to table next to English officers, not 
abashed, and ordered anything that pleased their taste, 
and wine in plenty. 

In that High Street of Amiens one day I saw a crowd 
gathered round an Australian, so tall that he towered over 
all other heads. It was at the corner of the rue du Corps 
Nu sans Teste, the Street of the Naked Body without a 
Head, and I suspected trouble. As I pressed on the edge 
of the crowd I heard the Australian ask, in a loud, slow 
drawl, whether there was any officer about who could 
speak French. He asked the question gravely, but with- 
out anxiety. I pushed through the crowd and said: 
*'I speak French. What's the trouble?" 

I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, 
this tall Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de 
police, a small man of whom he took no more notice than 
if a fly had settled on his wrist. The Australian was not 
drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to 
make his brain very clear and solemn. He explained the 
matter deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as 
though giving evidence of high matters before a court. 
It appeared that he had gone into the estaminet opposite 
with four friends. They had ordered five glasses of porto, 
for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank 
them. They then ordered five more glasses of porto and 



300 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

paid the same price, and drank them. After this they 
took a stroll up and down the street, and were bored, and 
went into the estaminet again, and ordered five more 
glasses of porto. It was then the trouble began. But it 
was not the Australian who began it. It was the woman 
behind the bar. She served five glasses more o{ porto and 
asked for thirty centimes each. 

"Twenty centimes," said the Australian. "Vingt, 
Madame." 

"Mais non! Trente centimes, chaque verre! Thirty, 
my old one. Six sous, comprenez?" 

"No comprennye," said the Australian. "Vingt cen- 
times, or go to hell." 

The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on 
demanding with a voice more shrill. 

"It was her voice that vexed me," said the Australian. 
"That and the bloody injustice." 

The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto^ and 
the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without 
further argument. Life is too short for argument. Then, 
without words, he took each of the five glasses, broke it 
at the stem, and dropped it over the counter. 

"You will see, sir," he said, gravely, "the justice of the 
matter on my side." 

But when they left the estaminet the woman came 
shrieking into the street after them. Hence the agent de 
police and the grasp on the Australian's wrist. 

"I should be glad if you would explain the case to this 
little Frenchman," said the soldier. "If he does not 
take his hand off my wrist I shall have to kill him." 

"Perhaps a little explanation might serve," I said. 

I spoke to the agent de police at some length, describing 
the incident in the cafe. I took the view that the lady 
was wrong in increasing the price so rapidly. The agent 
agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the Australian 
was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quie- 
tude he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He 
also had a curious dislike of policemen. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 301 

"It appears to me," I said, politely, "that for the sake 
of your health the other end of the street is better than 
this." 

The agent de police released his grip from the Aus- 
tralian's wrist and saluted me. 

"Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces 
Australiens sont vraiment formidables, n'est-ce pas?" 

He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling 
with a keen sense of understanding. Only the lady of 
the estaminet was unappeased. 

"They are bandits, these Australians!" she said to the 
world about her. 

The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely 
way. 

"Thanks for your trouble," he said. "It was the in- 
justice I couldn't stick. I always pay the right price. I 
come from Australia." 

I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois 
Cailloux, head above all the passers-by. He would be 
at Pozieres again next day. 

VII 

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents 
in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to 
the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, 
and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful 
thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in 
every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer win- 
dow. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, 
who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and 
then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a 
courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in 
the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous 
to be a fine lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The 
furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis Quinze 
and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and 
ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat. 



302 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

who might have been in the King's Company of the 
Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of 
Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I 
liked to think of them in these rooms and going in their 
sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high mass at 
the cathedral or to a game of bezique in some other 
mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, 
unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with 
many hundreds of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My 
little room was on the floor below the garret, and here at 
night, after a long day in the fields up by Pozieres or 
Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to 
Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every 
inch of ground, I used to write my day's despatch, to be 
taken next day (it was before we were allowed to use the 
military wires) by King's Messenger to England. 

Those articles, written at high speed, with an impres- 
sionism born out of many new memories of tragic and 
heroic scenes, were interrupted sometimes by air-bom- 
bardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens dur- 
ing the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to 
the station as they could guess, which was not often very 
near. Generally they killed a few women and children 
and knocked a few poor houses and a shop or two into a 
wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote, 
listening to the crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire 
of French guns from the citadel, I used to wonder sub- 
consciously whether I should suddenly be hurled into 
chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence, and now and 
again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get 
my message done (the censors were waiting for it down- 
stairs) I had to get up and walk into the passage to listen 
to the infernal noise in the dark city of Amiens. But I 
went back again and bent over my paper, concentrating 
on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so 
that the world might see and understand, until once 
again, ten minutes later or so, my will-power would 
weaken and the little devil of fear would creep up to my 



THE HEART OF A CITY 303 

heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to listen. 
Then once more to my -writing. . . . Nothing touched the 
house in the rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. 
But it was into my bedroom that a shell went crashing 
after that night in March when Amiens was badly 
wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all 
around us from a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other 
side of the way. I should have been sleeping still if I 
had slept that night in my little old bedroom when the 
shell paid a visit. 

There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and 
when I think of darkness I think of that city in time of 
war, when all the streets were black tunnels and one 
fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no flash-lamp, 
between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming 
into sharp collision sometimes with other wayfarers. 
But up to midnight there were little lights flashing for a 
second and then going out, along the Street of the Three 
Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets. They 
were carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on 
their way to their billets, and they clustered like glow- 
worms about the side door of the Hotel du Rhin after 
nine o'clock, and outside the railings of the public gardens. 
As one passed, the bright bull's-eye from a pocket torch 
flashed in one's eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw a 
girl's face, laughing, coming very close, while her fingers 
felt for one's badge. 

"How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not 
afraid of darkness? I am full of fear. It is so sad, this 
war, so dismal! It is comradeship that helps one now! 
... A little love ... a little laughter, and then — who 
knows ? " 

A little love ... a little laughter — alluring words to boys 
out of one battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely 
in their souls because of the thought of death, in exile 
from their own folk, in exile from all womanhood and 
tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches and shell- 
craters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters 



304 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

staffs, or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A 
little love, a little laughter, and then — ^who knows? The 
sirens had whispered their own thoughts. They had 
translated into pretty French the temptation of all the 
little devils in their souls. 

"Un peu d'amour — " 

One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow 
street toward the riverside, and then up a little dark 
stairway to a lamp-lit room. . . . Presently this poor boy 
would be stricken with disease and wish himself dead. 



VIII 

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small 
estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of 
coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly 
of extracts translated from the leading articles of English 
papers. (There was never any news of French fighting 
beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of 
a romantic kind written by French journalists in Paris 
about episodes of war.) In one corner of the estaminet 
was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking business for 
a time, and then listening to a monologue from the 
woman behind the counter. I could not catch many 
words of the conversation, owing to the general chatter, 
but when the man went out the woman and I were left 
alone together, and she came over to me and put a photo- 
graph down on the table before me, and, as though carry- 
ing on her previous train of thought, said, in French, of 
course: 

"Yes, that is what the war has done to me." 
I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photo- 
graph, I saw it was of a young girl in evening dress with 
her hair coiled in an artistic way and a little curl on each 
cheek. Madame's daughter, I thought, looking up at 
the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice 
and tousled hair. She looked a woman of about forty, 
with a wan face and beaten eyes. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 305 

"A charming young lady," I said, glancing again at the 
portrait. 

The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word. 

"Yes . . . that is what the war has done to me." 

I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face 
of the young girl in the photograph, but coarsened, aged, 
raddled, by the passing years and perhaps by tragedy. 

"It is you?" I asked. 

"Yes, in 191 3, before the war. I have changed since 
then — n'est-ce pas, Monsieur? 

"There is a change," I said. I tried not to express my 
thought of how much change. 

"You have suffered in the war — more than most 
people?" 

"Ah, I have suffered!" 

She told me her story, and word for word, if I could 
have written it down then, it would have read like a little 
novel by Guy de Maupassant. She was the daughter of 
people in Lille, well-to-do merchants, and before the war 
married a young man of the same town, the son of other 
manufacturers. They had two children and were very 
happy. Then the war came. The enemy drove down 
through Belgium, and one day drew near and threatened 
Lille. The parents of the young couple said: "We will 
stay. We are too old to leave our home, and it is better 
to keep watch over the factory. You must go, with the 
little ones, and there is no time to lose." 

There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded 
with fugitives and soldiers— mostly soldiers. It was nec- 
essary to walk. Weeping, the young husband and wife 
said farewell to their parents and set out on the long trail, 
with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of 
bread and wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes 
in a bundle. For days they tramped the roads until they 
were all dusty and bedraggled and footsore, but glad to 
be getting farther away from that tide of field-gray men 
which had now swamped over Lille. The young hus- 
band comforted his wife. "Courage!" he said. "I have 



3o6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

money enough to carry us through the war. We will set 
up a little shop somewhere." The maid wept bitterly 
now and then, but the young husband said: "We will 
take care of you, Margot. There is nothing to fear. We 
are lucky in our escape." He was a delicate fellow, re- 
jected for military service, but brave. They came to 
Amiens, and hired the estaminet and set up business. 
There was a heavy debt to work off for capital and ex- 
penses before they would make money, but they were 
doing well. The mother was happy with her children, 
and the little maid had dried her tears. Then one day 
the young husband went away with the little maid and 
all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet with a 
big debt to pay and a broken heart. 

"That is what the war has done to me," she said again, 
picking up the photograph of the girl in the evening frock 
with a little curl on each cheek. 

"C'est triste, Madame!" 

"Out, c'est triste, Monsieur!^' 

But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except 
that it had unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy 
de Maupassant would have given just such an ending to 
his story. 

IX 

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted 
in private houses, became very friendly with the families 
who received them. Young girls of good middle class, 
the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and 
merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful 
to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them 
French, to take walks with them, and to arrange musical 
evenings with other girl friends who brought their young 
officers and sang little old French songs with them or 
English songs in the prettiest French accent. These 
young officers of ours found the home life very charming. 
It broke the monotony of exile and made them forget the 
evil side of war. They paid little gallantries to the girls. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 307 

bought them boxes of chocolate until fancy chocolate was 
forbidden in France, and presented flowers to decorate 
the table, and wrote amusing verses in their autograph 
albums or drew sketches for them. As this went on they 
gained to the privilege of brotherhood, and there were 
kisses before saying "good night" outside bedroom doors, 
while the parents downstairs were not too watchful, know- 
ing the ways of young people, and lenient because of their 
happiness. Then a day came in each one of these house- 
holds when the officer billeted there was ordered away to 
some other place. What tears! What lamentations! 
And what promises never to forget little Jeanne with 
her dark tresses, or Suzanne with the merry eyes! Were 
they not engaged? Not formally, perhaps, but in honor 
and in love. For a time letters arrived, eagerly waited 
for by girls with aching hearts. Then picture post-cards 
with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then nothing. 
Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the 
letters addressed with all the queer initials for military 
units. So it happened again and again, until bitterness 
crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and contempt. 

"In my own little circle of friends," said a lady of 
Amiens, "I know eighteen girls who were engaged to 
English officers and have been forsaken. It is not fair. 
It is not good. Your English young men seem so serious, 
far more serious than our French boys. They have a 
look of shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, 
at first, and blush when one pays a pretty compliment. 
They are a long time before they take liberties. So we 
trust them, and take them seriously, and allow intimacies 
which we should refuse to French boys unless formally 
engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your Eng- 
lish young men are just flirts. They play with us, make 
fools of us, steal our hearts, and then go away, and often 
do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one little 
post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for them! 
You English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 
'play the game.' I know your phrase. It is untrue. 



3o8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

You play with good girls as though they were grues, and 
that no Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the 
difference between good girls and bad girls, and behaves, 
with reverence to those who are good. When the English 
army goes away from France it will leave many bitter 
memories because of that." 



It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through 
Amiens before going to bed, and generally turned river- 
ward, for even on moonless nights there was always a 
luminance over the water and one could see to walk along 
the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was 
quivering with flashes of white light, like summer light- 
ning, and now and then there was a long, vivid glare of 
red touching the high clouds with rosy feathers; one of 
our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up by 
that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for 
years. In that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some com- 
rade, like Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as tired and 
as thoughtful as oneself after a long day's journeying 
in the swirl of war, one's brain roved over the scenes of 
battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the agony 
up there, the death which was being done by those guns, 
and the stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw, 
after all, only one patch of the battlefields of the world, 
and yet were staggered by the immensity of its massacre, 
by the endless streams of wounded, and by the growth of 
those little forests of white crosses behind the fighting- 
lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the 
mind's eye — even in the darkness of an Amiens night — 
the vastness of the human energy which was in motion 
along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and 
Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every 
village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries 
bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their 
way to the army rail-heads with material of war and 



THE HEART OF A CITY 309 

more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains crowded 
with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing 
the casualty stations, the troops marching forward from 
back roads to the front, from which many would never 
come marching back, the guns and limbers and military 
transports and spare horses, along hundreds of miles of 
roads — all the machinery of slaughter on the move. It 
was staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its 
activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section 
of the western front there was the French front, larger 
than ours, stretching right through France, and all their 
roads were crowded with the same traffic, and all their 
towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and 
for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were 
crammed with the wreckage of youth. On the other side 
of the lines the Germans were busy in the same way, as 
busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind their front 
were cumbered by endless columns of transport and 
marching men, and guns and ambulances laaen with 
bashed, blinded, and bleeding boys. So it was in Italy, 
in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria, Serbia, Mesopo- 
tamia, Egypt. ... In the silence of Amiens by night, under 
the stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our fore- 
heads, with a glamour of light over the waters of the 
Somme, our spirit was stricken by the thought of this 
world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against this 
bloody crime in which all humanity was involved. The 
senselessness of it! The futility! The waste! The 
mockery of men's faith in God! . . . 

Often Palmer and I — dear, grave old Palmer, with 
sphinxlike face and honest soul — used to trudge along 
silently, with just a sigh now and then, or a groan, or a 
sudden cry of "O God! . . . O Christ!" It was I, 
generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: 
"Yes . . . and it's going to last a long time yet. A long 
time. . . . It's a question who will hold out twenty-four 
hours longer than the other side. France is tired, more 
tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow 



3IO NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

I think not. They are wonderful ! Their women have a 
gallant spirit. . . . How good it is, the smell of the trees 
to-night!'* 

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at 
the cathedral, high and beautiful above the huddle of 
old, old houses on the quayside, with a faint light on its 
pinnacle and buttresses and immense blackness beyond 
them. 

"Those builders of France loved their work," said 
Palmer. "There was always war about the walls of this 
cathedral, but they went on with it, stone by stone, with- 
out hurry." 

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, 
but many times, and out of those little dark streets below 
the cathedral of Amiens came the spirit of history to 
teach our spirit with wonderment at the nobility and the 
brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their 
patience with tyranny. 

"When is it all going to end. Palmer, old man?" 

"The war, or the folly of men?" 

"The war. This cursed war. This bloody war." 

"Something will break one day, on our side or the 
other. Those who hold out longest and have the best 
reserves of man-power." 

We were starting early next day — before dawn — to see 
the beginning of another battle. We walked slowly over 
the little iron bridge again, through the vegetable market, 
where old men and women were unloading cabbages from 
a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des 
Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de 
la Rochefoucauld in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was 
a light burning in the window of the censor's room. In 
there the colonel was reading The Times in the Louis 
Quinze salouy with a grave pucker on his high, thin fore- 
head. He could not get any grasp of the world's events. 
There was an attack on the censor by NorthclifFe. Now 
what did he mean by that? It was really very unkind 
of him, after so much civility to him. Chatteris would 



THE HEART OF A CITY 3" 

be furious. He would bang the telephone — but — dear, 
dear, why should people be so violent? War correspon- 
dents were violent on the slightest provocation. The 
world itself was very violent. And it was all so danger- 
ous. Don't you think so, Russell? 

The cars were ordered for five o'clock. Time for bed. 



XI 

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain 
fell heavily out of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp 
flashed out except where a solitary woman scurried down 
the wet streets to lonely rooms. There were no British 
officers stroUing about. They had turned in early, to 
hot baths and unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, 
with their burberries buttoned tight at the throat, and 
sopping field-caps pulled down about the ears, and top- 
boots which went splash, splash through deep puddles 
as they staggered a little uncertainly and peered up at 
dark corners to find their whereabouts, by a dim sense of 
locality and the shapes of the houses. The rain pattered 
sharply on the pavements and beat a tattoo on leaden 
gutters and slate roofs. Every window was shuttered 
and no light gleamed through. 

On such a night I went out with Beach Thomas, as 
often before, wet or fine, after hard writing. 

"A foul night," said Thomas, setting off in his quick, 
jerky step. "I like to feel the rain on my face." 

We turned down as usual to the river. It was very 
dark — the rain was heavy on the quayside, where there 
was a group of people bareheaded in the rain and chatter- 
ing in French, with gusts of laughter. 

"Une houteille de champagne!^* The words were 
spoken in a clear boy's voice, with an elaborate carica- 
ture of French accent, in musical cadence, but unmist^ak- 
ably English. 

**A drunken officer," said Thomas. 

''Poor devil!" 



312 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

We drew near among the people and saw a young officer 
arm in arm with a French peasant — one of the market 
porters — telling a tale in broken French to the audience 
about him, with comic gesticulations and extraordinary 
volubility. 

A woman put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in 
French. 

"He has drunk too much bad wine. His legs walk 
away from him. He will be in trouble, Monsieur. And 
a child — no older than my own boy who is fighting in the 
Argonne." 

"Apportez-moi une bouteille de champagne, vite! . . ." 
said the young officer. Then he waved his arm and said : 
"J'ai perdu mon cheval" ("A kingdom for a bloody 
horse!"), "as Shakespeare said. Y a-t'il quelquun qui a 
vu mon sacre cheval? In other words, if I don't find that 
four-legged beast which led to my damnation I shall be 
shot at dawn. Fusille, comprenez? On va me fusilier par 
un mur blanc — or is it une mure blanche? quand I'aurore 
se leve avec les couleurs d'une rose et I'odeur d'une jeune 
fille lavee et parfumee. Pretty good that, eh, what? 
But the fact remains that unless I find my steed, my 
charger, my war-horse, which in reality does not belong 
to me at all, because I pinched it from the colonel, I 
shall be shot as sure as fate, and, alas! I do not want to 
die. I am too young to die, and meanwhile I desire 
encore une bouteille de champagne!" 

The little crowd of citizens found a grim humor in this 
speech, one-third of which they understood. They 
laughed coarsely, and a man said: 

^^ Quel drole de type! Quel numero!" 

But the woman who had touched me on the sleeve 
spoke to me again. 

"He says he has lost his horse and will be shot as a 
deserter. Those things happen. My boy in the Argonne 
tells me that a comrade of his was shot for hiding five 
days with his young woman. It would be sad if this 
poor child should be condemned to death." 



THE HEART OF A CITY 313 

I pushed my way through the crowd and went up to 
the officer. 

"Can I help at all?" 

He greeted me warmdy, as though he had known me 
for years. 

"My dear old pal, you can indeed! First of all I want 
a bottle of champagne — une bouteille de champagne — " 
it was wonderful how much music he put into those words 
— "and after that I want my runaway horse, as I have 
explained to these good people who do not understand a 
bloody word, in spite of my excellent French accent. I 
stole the colonel's horse to come for a joy-ride to Amiens. 
The colonel is one of the best of men, but very touchy, 
very touchy indeed. You would be surprised. He also 
has the worst horse in the world, or did, until it ran away 
half an hour ago into the blackness of this hell which men 
call Amiens. It is quite certain that if I go back without 
that horse most unpleasant things will happen to a gallant 
young British officer, meaning myself, who with most 
innocent intentions of cleansing his soul from the filth of 
battle, from the horror of battle, from the disgusting fear 
of battle — oh yes, I've been afraid all right, and so have 
you unless you're a damned hero or a damned liar — de- 
sired to get as far as this beautiful city (so fair without, 
so foul within!) in order to drink a bottle, or even two 
or three, of rich, sparkling wine, to see the loveliness of 
women as they trip about these pestilential streets, to 
say a little prayer in la cathedrale, and then to ride back, 
refreshed, virtuous, knightly, all through the quiet night, 
to deliver up the horse whence I had pinched it, and 
nobody any the wiser in the dewy morn. You see, it 
was a good scheme." 

"What happened?" I asked. 

*'It happened thuswise," he answered, breaking out 
into fresh eloquence, with fantastic similes and expres- 
sions of which I can give only the spirit. "Leaving 
Pozieres, which, as you doubtless know, unless you are 
a bloody staff-officer, is a place where the devil goes about 



314 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, where 
he leaves his victims' entrails hanging on to barbed wire, 
and where the bodies of your friends and mine lie decom- 
posing in muddy holes — ypu know the place? — I put my 
legs across the colonel's horse, which was in the wagon- 
lines, and set forth for Amiens. That horse knew that 
I had pinched him — ^forgive my slang. I should have 
said it in the French language, vole — and resented me. 
Thrice was I nearly thrown from his back. Twice did 
he entangle himself in barbed wire deliberately. Once 
did I have to coerce him with many stripes to pass a tank. 
Then the heavens opened upon us and it rained. It 
rained until I was wet to the skin, in spite of sheltering 
beneath a tree, one branch of which, owing to the stub- 
born temper of my steed, struck me a stinging blow across 
the face. So in no joyful spirit I came at last to Amiens, 
this whited sepulcher, this Circe's capital, this den of 
thieves, this home of vampires. There I dined, not 
wisely, but too well. I drank of the flowing cup — une 
bouteille de champagne — and I met a maiden as ugly as 
sin, but beautiful in my eyes after Pozieres — you under- 
stand — and accompanied her to her poor lodging — in a 
most verminous place, sir — where we discoursed upon the 
problems of life and love. O youth! O war! O 
hell! . . . My horse, that brute who resented me, was in 
charge of an 'ostler, whom I believe verily is a Hmb of 
Satan, in the yard without. It was late when I left that 
lair of Circe, where young British officers, even as myself, 
are turned into swine. It was late and dark, and I was 
drunk. Even now I am very drunk. I may say that I 
am becoming drunker and drunker." 

It was true. The fumes of bad champagne were 
working in the boy's brain, and he leaned heavily 
against me. 

"It was then that that happened which will undoubtedly 
lead to my undoing, and blast my career as I have blasted 
my soul. The horse was there in the yard, but without 
saddle or bridle. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 315 

"'Where is my saddle and where is my bridle, oh, 
naughty 'ostler?' I shouted, in dismay. 

"The 'ostler, who, as I informed you, is one of Satan's 
imps, answered in incomprehensible French, led the horse 
forth from the yard, and, giving it a mighty blow on the 
rump, sent it clattering forth into the outer darkness. In 
my fear of losing it — for I must be at Pozieres at dawn — 
I ran after it, but it ran too fast in the darkness, and I 
stopped and tried to grope my way back to the stable- 
yard to kill that 'ostler, thereby serving God, and other 
British officers, for he was the devil's agent. But I could 
not find the yard again. It had disappeared! It was 
swallowed up in Cimmerian gloom. So I was without 
revenge and without horse, and, as you will perceive, 
sir — unless you are a bloody staff-officer who doesn't 
perceive anything — I am utterly undone. I am also 
horribly drunk, and I must apologize for leaning so 
heavily on your arm. It's awfully good of you, any- 
way, old man." 

The crowd was mostly moving, driven indoors by the 
rain. The woman who had spoken to me said, "I heard 
a horse's hoofs upon the bridge, la-bas." 

Then she went away with her apron over her head. 

Thomas and I walked each side of the officer, giving him 
an arm. He could not walk straight, and his legs played 
freakish tricks with him. All the while he talked in a 
strain of high comedy interlarded with grim little phrases, 
revealing an underlying sense of tragedy and despair, 
until his speech thickened and he became less fluent. 
We spent a fantastic hour searching for his horse. It 
was like a nightmare in the darkness and rain. Every 
now and then we heard, distinctly, the klip-klop of a 
horse's hoofs, and went off in that direction, only to be 
baffl.ed by dead silence, with no sign of the animal. Then 
again, as we stood listening, we heard the beat of hoofs 
on hard pavements, in the opposite direction, and walked 
that way, dragging the boy, who was getting more and 
more incapable of walking upright. At last we gave up 



3i6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

hope of finding the horse, though the young officer kept 
assuring us that he must find it at all costs. "It's a point 
of honor," he said, thickly. *'Not my horse, you know 
Doctor's horse. Devil to pay to-morrow." 

He laughed foolishly and said: 

"Always devil to pay in morning.'* 

We were soaked to the skin. 

"Come home with me," I said. "We can give you a 
shake-down." 

"Frightfully good, old man. Awfully sorry, you know, 
and all that. Are you a blooming general, or something? 
But I must find horse." 

By some means we succeeded in persuading him that 
the chase was useless and that it would be better for him 
to get into our billet and start out next morning, early. 
We dragged him up the rue des Augustins, to the rue 
Amiral Courbet. Outside the iron gates I spoke to him 
warningly: 

"You've got to be quiet. There are staff-officers in- 
side " 

"What? . . . Staff-officers? ... Oh, my God!" 

The boy was dismayed. The thought of facing staff- 
officers almost sobered him; did, indeed, sober his brain 
for a moment, though not his legs. 

"It's all right," I said. "Go quietly, and I will get you 
upstairs safely." 

It was astonishing how quietly he went, hanging on to 
me. The little colonel was reading The Times in the 
salon. We passed the open door, and saw over the paper 
his high forehead puckered with perplexity as to the ways 
of the world. But he did not raise his head or drop The 
Times at the sound of our entry. I took the boy upstairs 
to my room and guided him inside. He said, "Thanks 
awfully," and then lay down on the floor and fell into so 
deep a sleep that I was scared and thought for a moment 
he might be dead. I went downstairs to chat with the 
little colonel and form an ahbi in case of trouble. An 
hour later, when I went into my room, I found the boy 



THE HEART OF A CITY 317 

still lying as I had left him, without having stirred a limb. 
He was a handsome fellow, with his head hanging limply 
across his right arm and a lock of damp hair falling across 
his forehead. I thought of a son of mine, who in a few 
years would be as old as he, and I prayed God mine might 
be spared this boy's tragedy. . . . Through the night he 
slept in a drugged way, but just at dawn he woke up and 
stretched himself, with a queer little moan. Then he 
sat up and said: 

''Where am I.?" 
. "In a billet at Amiens. You lost your horse last night 
and I brought you here." 

Remembrance came Into his eyes and his face was 
swept with a sudden flush of shame and agony. 

"Yes ... I made a fool of myself. The worst possible. 
How can I get back to Pozieres?" 

"You could jump a lorry with luck." 

"I must. It's serious if I don't get back in time. In 
any case, the loss of that horse — " 

He thought deeply for a moment, and I could see that 
his head was aching to the beat of sledge-hammers. 

"Can I wash anywhere?" 

I pointed to a jug and basin, and he said, "Thanks, 
enormously." 

He washed hurriedly, and then stared down with a 
shamed look at his muddy uniform, all creased and be- 
draggled. After that he asked if he could get out down- 
stairs, and I told him the door was unlocked. 

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room. 

"I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was 
very decent of you. Many thanks." 

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if 
he died at Pozieres, or farther on by the Butte de Warlen- 
court. ... A week later I saw an advertisement in an 
Amiens paper: "Horse found. Brown, with white sock 
on right foreleg. Apply — " 

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had 
searched in the rain. 



3i8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

XII 

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning 
on the right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. 
Charlie's bar was on the left-hand side of the street, 
always crowded after six o'clock by officers of every 
regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry 
cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously 
to forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift 
of laughter, and made them careless of the battles which 
would have to be fought. Young stafF-officers were there, 
explaining carefully how hard worked they were and how 
often they went under shell-fire. The fighting officers, 
EngHsh, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed 
hugely at the latest story of mirthful horror, arranged 
rendezvous at the Godebert restaurant, where they would 
see the beautiful Marguerite (until she transferred to 
la cathedrale in the same street) and our checks which 
Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British 
honesty, not often, as he told me, being hurt by a "stu- 
mor." CharHe's bar was wrecked by shell-fire afterward, 
and he went to Abbeville and set up a more important 
estabhshment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air raid, 
before the paint was dry on the walls. 

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and 
women went all through the war, called into its white 
halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt there, and by 
its silence and peace. The great west door was screened 
from bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside 
there were other walls of sand-bags closing in the sanctu- 
ary and some of the windows. But these signs of war 
did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns and high 
roof, nor the lovehness of the sculptured flowers below the 
clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of those great, 
dim aisles, where light flickered and shadows lurked, and 
the ghosts of history came out of their tombs to pace 
these stones again where five, six, seven centuries before 
they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair, oi 



THE HEART OF A CITY '319 

to show their beauty of young womanhood — peasant girl 
or princess — to lovers gazing by the pillars, or to plight 
their troth as royal brides, or get a crown for their heads, 
or mercy for their dead bodies in velvet-draped coffins. 

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before 
other English soldiers, who came out with Edward the 
Black Prince, by way of Crecy, or with Harry the King, 
through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence, if Amiens 
cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and mon- 
strous conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation 
of that time will think now and then, perhaps, of the 
English lads in khaki who tramped up the highway of 
this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each 
footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old 
flagstones, awed by the silence and the spaciousness, with 
a sudden heartache for a closer knowledge, or some knowl- 
edge, of the God worshiped there — the God of Love — 
while, not far away, men were killing one another by high 
explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, 
bayonets, poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close 
fighting, with short daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs 
with steel knobs. I watched the faces of the men who 
entered here. Some of them, like the Australians and 
New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not re- 
ligious by instinct or training, wandered round in a won- 
dering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now 
and then, for these mysteries — the chanting of the Office, 
the tinkling of the bells at the high mass — which were 
beyond their understanding, and which they could not 
link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away 
up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing 
to do, seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when 
they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke 
bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German 
boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped on 
them in the darkness and made haste with their killing. 
All the same, this great church was wonderful, and the 
Australians, scrunching their slouch-hats, stared up at 



320 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the tall columns to the clerestory arches, and peered 
through the screen to the golden sun upon the high-altar, 
and touched old tombs with their muddy hands, reading 
the dates on them — 1250, 1155, 1415 — ^with astonishment 
at their antiquity. Their clean-cut hatchet faces, sun- 
baked, tanned by rain and wind, their simple blue-gray 
eyes, the fine, strong grace of their bodies, as they stood 
at ease in this place of history, struck me as being wonder- 
fully like all that one imagines of those English knights 
and squires — Norman-English — who rode through France 
with the Black Prince. It is as though AustraHa had 
bred back to the old strain. Our own English soldiers 
were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and neat, not 
such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked 
up the aisles, standing in groups where a service was in 
progress, watching the movements of the priests, listening 
to the choir and organ with reverent, dreamy eyes. Some 
of them — country lads — thought back, I fancy, to some 
village church in England where they had sung hymns 
with mother and sisters in the days before the war. Eng- 
land and that little church were a long way off now, per- 
haps all eternity away. I saw one boy standing quite 
motionless, with wet eyes, without self-consciousness. 
This music, this place of thoughtfulness, had made some- 
thing break in his heart. . . . Some of our young officers, 
but not many, knelt on the cane chairs and prayed, face 
in hands. French officers crossed themselves and their 
medals tinkled as they walked up the aisles. Always 
there were women in black weeds kneeling before the side- 
altars, praying to the Virgin for husbands and sons, dead 
or alive, lighting candles below holy pictures and statues. 
Our men tiptoed past them, holding steel hats or field- 
caps, and putting their packs against the pillars. On the 
steps of the cathedral I heard two officers talking one day. 
"How can one reconcile all this with the war.?'* 
"Why not? ... I suppose we're fighting for justice and 
all that. That's what The Daily Mail tells us." 

"Seriously, old man. Where does Christ come in?" 



THE HEART OF A CITY 321 

"He wasn't against righteous force. He chased the 
money-changers out of the Temple." 

"Yes, but His whole teaching was love and forgiveness. 
'Thou shalt not kill.' 'Little children, love one an- 
other!' 'Turn the other cheek.' ... Is it all sheer tosh? 
If so, why go on pretending? . . . Take chaplains in khaki 
— these lieutenant-colonels with black crosses. They 
make me sick. It's either one thing or the other. Brute 
force or Christianity. I am harking back to the brute- 
force theory. But I'm not going to say 'God is love' 
one day and then prod a man in the stomach the next. 
Let's be consistent." 

"The other fellows asked for it. They attacked 
first." 

"Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our 
secret treaties, our philosophical dope over the masses, 
our imperial egotism, our trade rivalries — all that was a 
direct challenge of Might against Right. The Germans 
are more efficient and more logical — that's all. They 
prepared for the inevitable and struck first. We knew 
the inevitable was coming, but didn't prepare, being too 
damned inefficient. ... I have a leaning toward rehgion. 
Instinctively I'm for Christ. But it doesn't work in with 
efficiency and machine-guns." 

"It belongs to another department, that's all. We're 
spiritual and animal at the same time. In one part of 
my brain I'm a gentleman. In another, a beast. It's 
conflict. We can't eliminate the beast, but we can con- 
trol it now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and 
that's where religion helps. It's the high ideal — other- 
worldliness." 

"The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ 
and ask for victory." 

"Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems 
to me God is above all the squabbles of humanity — 
doesn't care a damn about them! — but the human soul 
can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal, even 
while he is doing butcher's work, and beastliness. That 



322 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

doesn't matter very much. It's part of the routine of 
life." 

**But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation 
in the world. It creates cruelty and tyranny, and all 
bloody things. Surely if we believe in God — anyhow in 
Christian ethics — this war is a monstrous crime in which 
all humanity is involved." 

"The Hun started it. . . . Let's go and give the glad eye 
to Marguerite." 

At night, in moonhght, Amiens cathedral was touched 
with a new spirituality, a white magic beyond all words 
of beauty. On many nights of war I walked round the 
cathedral square, looking up at that grand mass of 
masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming 
like silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and 
a flood of milky light glamorous on walls in which every 
stone was clear-cut beyond a vast shadow-world. How 
old it was! How many human eyes through many cen- 
turies had come in the white light of the moon to look at 
this dream in stone enshrining the faith of men! The 
Revolution had surged round these walls, and the screams 
of wild women, and their shrill laughter, and their cries 
for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from this square. 
Pageants of kingship and royal death had passed across 
these pavements through the great doors there. Peasant 
WDmen, in the darkness, had wept against these walls, 
praying for God's pity for their hearts. Now the EngHsh 
officers were lighting cigarettes in the shelter of a wall, 
the outline of their features — knightly faces — touched by 
the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky 
beyond the river. 

"A good night for a German air raid," said one of the 
officers. 

"Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep," 
said the other man. 

The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light 
gleamed through their shutters. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 323 

XIII 

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street 
going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the 
Palais de Justice — a big, grim building, with a long flight 
of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico 
the figure of Justice, bhnd, holding her scales. There was 
no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French 
soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like 
that woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on 
the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passers-by 
to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white 
masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads. Others 
showed only the upper parts of their faces, and the places 
where their jaws had been were tied up with white rags. 
There were men without noses, and men with half their 
scalps torn away. French children used to stare through 
the railings at them, gravely, with childish curiosity, with- 
out pity. English soldiers gave them a passing glance, 
and went on to places where they might be made like this, 
without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their uni- 
forms I saw that there were Chasseurs Alpins, and Chas- 
seurs d'Afrique, and young infantrymen of the line, and 
gunners. They sat, without restlessness, watching the 
passers-by if they had eyes to see, or, if blind, feeling the 
breeze about them, and hstening to the sound of passing 
feet. 

XIV 

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the 
Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was 
a charming walk along the tow-path, past market-gardens 
going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past 
the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in 
days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture — these 
cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come 
for week-ends of boating and fishing — and their garden 



324 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

gates at the end of wooden bridges over back-waters were 
of iron twisted into the shapes of swans or flowers, and 
there were snails of terra-cotta on the chimney-pots, and 
painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste, yet 
amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bov/ers. 
I remember one called Mon Idee, and wondered that any 
man should be proud of such a freakish conception of a 
country house. They were abandoned during the war, 
except one or two used for casual rendezvous between 
French officers and their light o' loves, and the tow-path 
was used only by stray couples who came out for loneli- 
ness, and British soldiers walking out with French girls. 
The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, 
shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, 
cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther up-stream there 
was a boat-house where orderlies from the New Zealand 
hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour's rowing, 
leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathe- 
dral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the en- 
circling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, 
or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath 
their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was 
silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of 
distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming 
when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside 
Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the 
French call la raj ale des tambours de la mort — the ruffle of 
the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme 
flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by 
Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead 
bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter 
of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and am- 
munition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, 
and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges 
the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. 
These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed 
men at a carpenter's yard just below the bridge, outside 
the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being 



THE HEART OF A CITY 325 

lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. 
They were the bad cases — French boys wounded in the 
abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn ofF, or hope- 
lessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, 
even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful 
anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. 
Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and 
the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The 
sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the 
color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision 
of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women 
watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as 
the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of 
them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to 
me one day. 

"That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! 
Assassins!" 

"Yes. That is war, Madame." 

She put a skinny hand on my arm. 

"Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are 
killed?" 

"Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left 
alive. The very old and the very young, and the lucky 
ones, and those behind the lines." 

"The Germans are losing many men. Monsieur?" 

"Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn 
about the fields." 

"Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose 
their sons, as I have lost mine." 

"Where was that, Madame?" 

"Over there." 

She pointed up the Somme. 

"He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yes- 
terday he lay at my breast. My man weeps for him. 
They were good comrades." 

"It is sad, Madame." 

"Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur." 

"Au revoir, Madame." 

22 



326 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

XV 

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway 
station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. 
I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the 
army of von Kluck had passed through the city and gone 
beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instru- 
ments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. 
The French doctor who took me round told me the enemy 
had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had refrained 
from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did 
not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That 
was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I 
was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard 
strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten 
me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead. 

"Trench fever," said the doctor. 

"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My 
word, how white you are! Had a hard time, eh, like the 
rest of them?" 

I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only 
one other bed between me and the wall. That was occu- 
pied by the gunner-general of the New Zealand Division. 
Opposite was another row of beds in which officers lay 
sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes. 

"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy- 
cheeked young orderly, after taking my temperature and 
feeling my pulse. It was his way of cheering a patient 
up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in the Dar-: 
danelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged 
in reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had 
a grim gift of silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on 
my left was a handsome boy with a fine, delicate face, a 
subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a pile of books 
at his elbow — all by Anatole France. It was the first 
time I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak 
and helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The 
day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand girl whom the 



THE HEART OF A CITY 327 

general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back 
more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, "Good 
night, all!" and the night nurse took her place, and made 
a first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman 
with the complexion of a delicate rose and large, luminous 
eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a 
spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these 
men, who were like children in her hands. They seemed 
glad at,her coming. 

*'Good evening, sister!" said one man after another, 
even one who had laid with his eyes closed for an hour or 
more, with a look of death on his face. 

She knelt down beside each one, saying, "How are you 
to-night .f'" and chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the 
bed beyond. From one bed I heard a boy's voice say: 
"Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given me two 
minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in 
love with you, you know, and I have been waiting all day 
for your beauty!" 

There was a gust of laughter in the ward. 

"The child is at it again!" said one of the officers. 

"When are you going to write me another sonnet.?" 
asked the nurse. "The last one was much admired." 

"The last one was rotten," said the boy. "I have 
written a real corker this time. Read it to yourself, and 
don't drop its pearls before these swine." 

"Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all." 

An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, 
hurled the bedclothes oflp and sat on the edge of his bed 
in his pajamas. 

"I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't 
want to be a hero! I don't want to die! I want to be 
loved! . . . I'm a glutton for love!" 

In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a 
schoolboy who was mine and who still liked to be tucked 
up in bed by his mother. With his tousled hair and his 
petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been Peter 
Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to 



328 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

chide him. It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly 
as he had thrown off his clothes he snuggled under them 
again and said: "All right, I'll be good. Only I want a 
kiss before I go to sleep." 

I became good friends with that boy, who was a 
promising young poet, and a joyous creature no more 
fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck and 
horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a 
boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, 
because he loved life. But he was killed. ... I had 
a letter from his stricken mother months afterward. 
The child was "Missing" then, and her heart cried 
out for him. 

Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lanca- 
shire — I suppose he had been in a cotton-mill or a factory 
— a hard-headed, simple-hearted fellow, as good as gold, 
and always speaking of "the wife." But his nerves had 
gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the 
dreams that came to him. 

"Sister," he said, "don't let me go to sleep. Wake me 
up if you see me dozing. I see terrible things in my 
dreams. Frightful things. I can't bear it." 

"You will sleep better to-night," she said. "I am 
putting something in your milk. Something to stop the 
dreaming." 

But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, 
and heard the man opposite muttering and moaning, in 
his sleep. Sometimes he would give a long, quivering 
sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in 
a dazed way, saying: 

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" trembling with fear, so 
that the bed was shaken. The night nurse was always 
by his side in a moment when he called out, hushing him 
down, whispering to him. 

"I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my 
sleep," he told me. "It's what I saw up at Bazentin, 
There was a fellow with his face blown off, walking about. 
I see him every night. Queer, isn't it.f* Nerves, 3^ou 



THE HEART OF A CITY 329 

know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before 
this war." 

The Httle night nurse came to my bedside. 

"Can't you sleep?" 

"I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer 
way. May I smoke?" 

She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a 
match. 

"Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need 
lots of sleep." 

In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights 
in red glasses, and now and then all through the night 
matches were lighted, illuminating the room for a second, 
followed by the glowing end of a cigarette shining like a 
star in the darkness. 

The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about vio- 
lently, gave strange jerks and starts. Sometimes they 
spoke aloud in their sleep. 

"That isn't a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell.'* 

"Now then, get on with it, can't you?" 

"Look out! They're coming! Can't you see them 
moving by the wire?'* 

The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them 
even in their sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their 
subconsciousness. Sights which they had tried to forget 
stared at them through their closed eyelids. The day- 
light came and the night nurse slipped away, and the 
day nurse shook one's shoulders and said: "Time to wash 
and shave. No malingering!" 

It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as 
rats had to sit up in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave 
themselves. 

"You're merciless!" I said, laughing painfully when the 
day nurse dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o'clock 
on a winter morning, with the windows wide open. 

"Oh, there's no mercy in this place!** said the strong- 
minded girl. "It's kill or cure here, and no time to 
worry." 



330 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

''You're all devils," said the New Zealand general. 
"You don't care a damn about the patients so long as 
you have all the beds tidy by the time the doctor comes 
around. I'm a general, I am, and you can't order me 
about, and if you think I'm going to shave at this time 
in the morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down 
with dysentery, and don't you forget it. I didn't get 
through the Dardanelles to be murdered at Amiens." 

''That's where you may be mistaken, general," said the 
imperturbable girl. "I have to carry out orders, and if 
they lead to your death it's not my responsibility. I'm 
paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my duty, rough or 
smooth, kill or cure." 

"You're a vampire. That's what you are.'* 

"I'm a nurse." 

"If ever I hear you're going to marry a New Zealand 
boy I'll warn him against you." 

"He'll be too much of a fool to listen to you." 

"I've a good mind to marry you myself and beat you 
every morning." 

" Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm !" 

Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as 
the German mark was the railway station we were in the 
center of the danger-zone. There was a frightful noise of 
splintering glass and smashing timber between each crash 
of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the anti- 
aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears 
of those officers who had come down from the fighting- 
lines nerve-racked and fever-stricken. They lay very 
quiet. The night nurse moved about from bed to bed, 
with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed 
no other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at 
that time, though they had done the hero's job all right. 

It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick 
again, that an officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, "If 
there is another air raid I shall go mad." He had been 
stationed near the blast-furnace of Les Izelquins, near 



THE HEART OF A CITY 331 

Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over 
sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his 
men, until he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hos- 
pital some of the patients had their heads under the bed- 
clothes Hke Httle children. 



XVI 

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was 
deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 
191 8, which will be remembered forever to the age-long 
history of Amiens as its night of greatest tragedy. For a 
week the enemy had been advancing across the old battle- 
fields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 
2 1 St, when our fines were stormed and broken by his men's 
odds against our defending troops. We war correspond- 
ents had suffered mental agonies like all who knew what 
had happened better than the troops themselves. Every 
day after the first break-through we pushed out in difi'er- 
ent directions — Hamilton Fyfe and I went together some- 
times until we came up with the backwash of the great 
retreat, ebbing back and back, day after day, with in- 
creasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It 
was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a 
chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant 
trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly 
way, directed by some controlling or communal intelli- 
gence, only instead of eggs and sticks these soldier-ants 
of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were 
trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambu- 
lances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, 
agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway en- 
gines, Y. M. C. A. tents, gun-horse and mule columns, 
while rear-guard actions were being fought within gun- 
fire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back 
along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came 
that a further retreat was happening and that the enemy 
had broken through again. . , . 



332 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to 
the north, Albert was held by a mixed crowd of Scottish 
and English troops, too thin, as I could see when I passed 
through them, to fight any big action, with an enemy 
advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our 
line by Montauban and Fricourt. I saw our men march- 
ing hastily in retreat to escape that tightening net, and 
while the southern side of Amiens was held by a crowd of 
stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks from headquar- 
ters staffs, and dismounted cavalry, commanded by 
Brigadier-General Carey, sent down hurriedly to link 
them together and stop a widening gap until the French 
could get to our rehef on the right and until the Austra- 
lians had come down from Flanders. There was nothing 
on that day to prevent the Germans breaking through 
to Amiens except the courage of exhausted boys thinly 
strung out, and the lagging footsteps of the Germans 
themselves, who had suffered heavy losses all the way 
and were spent for a while by their progress over the wild 
ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns were 
far behind, unable to keep pace with the storm troops, 
and the enemy was relying entirely on machine-guns and 
a few field-guns, but most of our guns were also out of 
action, captured or falling back to new lines, and upon 
the speed with which the enemy could mass his men for 
a new assault depended the safety of Amiens and the road 
to Abbeville and the coast. If he could hurl fresh divi- 
sions of men against our line on that last night of March, 
or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or armored cars, our 
line would break and Amiens would be lost, and all our 
work would be in jeopardy. That was certain. It was 
visible. It could not be concealed by any camouflage of 
hope or courage. 

It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing 
through our retiring troops, that I sat down, with other 
war correspondents and several officers, to a dinner in the 
old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It was a dismal meal, in a 
room where there had been much laughter and, through- 



THE HEART OF A CITY 333 

out the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going 
of generals and staffs and officers of all grades, cheery and 
high-spirited at these little tables where there were good 
wine and not bad food, and putting away from their minds 
for the time being the thought of tragic losses or forlorn 
battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of the 
hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered by 
flower-beds, I had had strange conversations with boys 
who had revealed their souls a httle, after dinner in the 
darkness, their faces bared now and then by the light 
of cigarettes or the flare of a match. 

"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down 
from the Somme fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled 
nerves. '^I don't care a damn for death; but it's the wait- 
ing for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of 
one's pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear 
under shell-fire, that break one's pluck. . . . My nerves 
are like fiddle-strings." 

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now 
and then between their stories, had told me their experi- 
ences in shell-craters and ditches under frightful fire which 
had "wiped out" their platoons or companies. A be- 
draggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling 
gull, used to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked 
under his wing, and its head on one side, with one watch- 
ful, beady eye fixed on the figures in khaki — until sud- 
denly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a wonderful 
imitation of machine-gun fire — "Curse the bloody bird I'* 
said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise— 
and caper with ridiculous postures round the imperturb- 
able gull. . . . Beyond the lines, from the dining-room, 
would come the babble of many tongues and the laughter 
of officers telling stories against one another over their 
bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, be- 
tween our discussions on strategy — he was a strategist by 
virtue of service in the trenches and several wounds — or 
by "Von Tirpitz," an older, whiskered man, or by Joseph, 
who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views against 



334 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the fair sex, and the inevitable cry, ''Cest la guerre!" when 
officers complained of the service. . . . There had been 
merry parties in this room, crowded with the ghosts ot 
many heroic fellows, but it was a gloomy gathering on 
that evening at the end of March when we sat there for 
the last time. There were there officers who had lost 
their towns, and "Dadoses" (Deputy Assistant Director 
of Ordnance Supplies) whose stores had gone up in smoke 
and flame, and a few cavalry officers back from special 
leave and appalled by what had happened in their ab- 
sence, and a group of Y. M. C. A, officials who had escaped 
by the skin of their teeth from huts now far behind the 
German lines, and censors who knew that no blue pencil 
could hide the truth of the retreat, and war correspond- 
ents who had to write the truth and hated it. 

Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: " Mon 
petit caporal" — he called me that because of a fancied 
likeness to the young Napoleon — "dites done. Fous eroyez 
quits vont passer par Amiens? Non, ce nest pas possible, 
qal Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le croire. 
Mais cest mauvais, c'est affreux, apres taut de sacrifice!" 

Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for 
company's sake, fixing up accounts as though the last 
day of reckoning had come ... as it had. Her hair, with 
its little curls, was still in perfect order. She had two 
dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a 
waxen pallor. She was working out accounts with a 
young officer, who smoked innumerable cigarettes to 
steady his nerves. "Von Tirpitz" was going round in an 
absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers. 

The war correspondents talked together. We spoke 
gloomily, in low voices, so that the waiters should not 
hear. 

"If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the 
coast." 

"Will that be a win for the Germans, even then.?" 

"It will make it hell in the Channel." 

"We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire." 



THE HEART OF A~ CITY 335 

"France won't give in now, whatever happens. And 
England never gives in." 

"We're exhausted, all the same. It's a question of 
man-power." 

"They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow." 

"I don't see that at all. There's still a line . . ." 

"A line! A handful of tired men." 

"It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux 
to-night. It commands Amiens. They could blow the 
place off the map." 

"They won't." 

"We keep on saying, *They won't.' We said, 'They 
won't get the Somme crossings!' but they did. Let's 
face it squarely, without any damned false optimism. 
That has been our curse all through." 

"Better than your damned pessimism." 

"It's quite possible that they will be in this city to-' 
night. What is to keep them back? There's nothing up 
the road." 

"It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. 
How they would laugh!" 

"We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to 
keep an eye on things." 

"How are we to know.f* We are utterly without means 
of communication. Anything may happen in the night." 

Something happened then. It was half past seven in 
the evening. There were two enormous crashes outside 
the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All the windows 
shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was 
a noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cas- 
cade of falling glass. Instinctively and instantly a num- 
ber of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape 
flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways. 
Then some one laughed. 

"Not this time!" 

The officers rose from the floor and took their places at 
the table, and lit cigarettes again. But they were list- 
ening. We hstened to the loud hum of airplanes, the 



336 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

well known "zooz-zooz" of the Gothas' double fuselage. 
More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the 
same sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti- 
aircraft guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus 
of shrapnel shells winging over the roofs. 

"Bang I... Crash!" 

That was nearer again. 

Some of the officers strolled out of the dining-room. 

"They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better 
get away before it gets too hot." 

Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts 
again. I noticed the increasing pallor of her skin beneath 
the two dabs of red. But she controlled her nerves 
pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer who was 
settling up for a group of others. 

The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It 
was astoundingly bright and beautiful in a clear sky and 
still air, and the streets were flooded with white light, 
and the roofs glittered like silver above intense black 
shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by 
projecting walls. 

"Curse the moon!" said one officer. "How I hate its 
damned light!" 

But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the 
world at war and into this old city of Amiens, in which 
bombs were bursting. Women were running close to the 
walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one doorway 
to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the 
Street of the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in 
the sky above them and paving-stones were hurled up in 
bursts of red fire and explosions. Many horses were 
killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding mon- 
strously so that there were large pools of blood around 
them. 

An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du 
Rhin. He was white under his steel hat, which he pushed 
back while he wiped his forehead. 

"A fellow was killed just by my side," he said. "We 



THE HEART OF A CITY 337 

were standing in a doorway together and something 
caught him in the face. He fell like a log, without a 
sound, as dead as a door-nail." 

There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with 
that double note which vibrated like 'cello strings, very 
loudly, and with that sinister noise I could see them quite 
clearly now and then as they passed across the face of 
the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel 
below them. From time to time they went away until 
they were specks of silver and black; but always they 
came back again, or others came, with new stores of 
bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went 
on all through the night. 

I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to 
sleep. But it was impossible. My will-power was not 
strong enough to disregard those crashes in the streets 
outside, when houses collapsed with frightful falling 
noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw 
the ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and 
the room in which I lay engulfed in the chaos of this 
wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times I said, "To hell 
with it all . . . I'm going to sleep," and then sat up in the 
darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on 
the electric light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in 
the corridor there was a stampede of heavy boots. Offi- 
cers were running to get into the cellars before the next 
crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The 
thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of 
gravity. I walked along the corridor, now deserted, and 
saw a stairway littered with broken glass, which my feet 
scrunched. There were no lights in the basement of the 
hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its pale 
eye fumbled my way to a stone passage leading to the 
cellar. That flight of stone steps was Uttered also with 
broken glass. In the cellar itself was a mixed company 
of men who had been dining earlier in the evening, joined 
by others who had come in from the streets for shelter. 
Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bed- 



338 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

rooms and were lying there in their trench-coats, with 
their steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on 
wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while there Were 
others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, try- 
ing to sleep. There were some of the town majors who 
had lost their towns, and some Canadian cavalry officers, 
and two or three private soldiers, and some motor-drivers 
and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel lying 
together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of 
the vaulted room two American war correspondents — 
Sims and Mackenzie — ^were sitting on a packing-case 
playing cards on a board between them. They had 
stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering 
light played on their faces and cast deep shadows under 
their eyes. I stood watching these men in that cellar 
and thought what a good subject it would be for the pen- 
cil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable 
place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and 
when I lay down there my bones ached abominably, and 
it was very cold. Through an aperture in the window 
came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moon- 
lit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A 
direct hit on the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess 
in this vaulted room and end a game of cards. After 
fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the 
room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this 
damp cellar and these hard stones. I returned to it and 
lay down on the bed again and switched off" the light. 
But the noises outside, the loneliness of the room, the 
sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up 
again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning 
over Amiens again. Many houses round about were 
being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was being 
made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the 
room, smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty 
explosion, very close, made all my nerves quiver. No, 
decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If one had to 
die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down 



THE HEART OF A CITY 339 

I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, 
too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned 
bedrooms. 

" I am getting bored with this," he said. " It's absurd to 
think that this filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But 
the dugout sense calls one down. Anyhow, I can't sleep." 

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something 
comical as well as sinister in the sight of the company 
there sprawled on the mattresses, vainly trying to extract 
comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or gas-bags on 
steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the 
old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and 
or Bill, with a fierce frown above his black mustache. 
Sims and Mackenzie still played their game of cards, 
silently, between the guttering candles. 

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from 
the bedroom to the cellar, six times that night. There 
was never ten minutes' relief from the drone of Gothas, 
who were making a complete job of Amiens. It was at 
four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw 
me wandering before. 

"Let us go for a walk," he said. "The birds will be 
away by dawn." 

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side 
door of the Hotel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of 
the Three Pebbles. There was still the same white moon- 
light, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It 
shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses 
of horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly 
smell rose. The roadway was littered with bits of timber 
and heaps of masonry. Many houses had collapsed into 
wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been 
stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were 
scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, 
as we explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hun- 
dreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air raid 
ceased at 4.30 a.m., when the first Hght of dawn came into 
the sky. ... 



340 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the 
French military authorities, and the inhabitants trailed 
out of the city, leaving everything behind them. I saw 
the women locking up their shops — ^where there were any 
doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people 
must have been killed and buried in the night beneath 
their own houses — I never knew how many. The fugi- 
tives escaped the next phase of the tragedy in Amiens 
when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the first 
high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered 
them about the city, destroying many other houses. A 
fire started by these shells formed a great gap between 
the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois Cailloux, where 
there had been an arcade and many good shops and 
houses. I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams 
and twisted ironwork when I went through the city after 
the day of exodus. 

XVII 

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the 
days of its desolation, and we who had known its people 
so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a 
tragic aspect — I often think of Douai, which was left with 
all its people under compulsion of the enemy — but Amiens 
was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow 
streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells 
in flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction 
and now in another. 

One of our sentries came out of a little house near the 
Place and said: 

*' Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, 
sir. They've been falling pretty thick on the east side. 
Made no end of a mess!" 

On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Aus- 
tralian headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we 
ate sandwiches in the public gardens outside the Hotel 
du Rhin. There were big shell-holes in the flower-beds, 
and trees had been torn down and flung across the path- 



THE HEART OF A CITY 341 

way, and there was a broken statue lying on the grass* 
Some French and EngHsh soldiers tramped past. Then 
there was no Hving soul about in the place which had 
been so crowded with life, with pretty women and chil- 
dren, and young officers doing their shopping, and the 
business of a city at work. 

"It makes one understand what Rome was like after 
the barbarians had sacked and left it," said a friend of 
mine. 

"There is something ghastly about it,*' said another. 

We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and aban- 
doned. The house next door had been wrecked, and it 
was scarred and wounded, but still stood after that night 
of terror. 

One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in 
Amiens, in the cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to 
celebrate the Fourth of July, and an invitation had been 
sent to me by the French commandant de place and the 
EngHsh A. P. M. 

It was a heau geste, gallant and romantic in those days 
of trouble, when Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but 
safer now that Australians and British troops were hold- 
ing the lines strongly outside, with French on their right 
southward from Boves and Hangest Wood. The French 
commandant had procured a collection of flags and his 
men had decorated the battered city with the Tricolor. 
It even fluttered above some of the ruins, as though for 
the passing of a pageant. But only a few cars entered the 
city and drew up to the Town Hall, and then took cover 
behind the walls. 

Down below, in the cellars, the damp walls were gar- 
landed with flowers from the market - gardens of the 
Somme, now deserted by their gardeners, and roses were 
heaped on the banqueting-table. General Monash, com- 
manding the Australian corps, was there, with the general 
of the French division on his right. A young American 
officer sat very grave and silent, not, perhaps, understand- 
ing much of the conversation about him, because most of 



342 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the guests were French ojfficers, with Senators and Deputies 
of Amiens and its Department. There was good wine to 
drink from the cold vaults of the Hotel de Ville, and with 
the scent of rose and hope for victory in spite of all disas- 
ters — ^the German offensive had been checked and the 
Americans were now coming over in a tide — it was a 
cheerful luncheon-party. The old general, black-visaged, 
bullet-headed, with a bristly mustache like a French bull- 
terrier, sat utterly silent, eating steadily and fiercely. 
But the French commandant de placey as handsome as 
Athos, as gay as D'Artagnan, raised his glass to England 
and France, to the gallant Allies, and to all fair women. 
He became reminiscent of his days as a sous-lientenant. 
He remembered a girl called Marguerite — she was ex- 
quisite; and another called Yvonne — he had adored her. 
O life! O youth! . . . He had been a careless young 
devil, with laughter in his heart. . . . 

XVIII 

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the 
first crowds coming back to their homes in Amiens. The 
tide had turned and the enemy was in hard retreat. 
Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt 
of this homecoming after that day nearly three months 
before, when, in spite of the enemy's being so close, Foch 
said, in his calm way, "I guarantee Amiens." They be- 
lieved what Marshal Foch said. He always knew. So 
now they were coming back again with their little bundles 
and their babies and small children holding their hands 
or skirts, according as they had received permits from 
the French authorities. They were the lucky ones whose 
houses still existed. They were conscious of their own 
good fortune and came chattering very cheerfully from 
the station up the Street of the Three Pebbles, on their 
way to their streets. But every now and then they gave 
a cry of surprise and dismay at the damage dorie to other 
people's houses. 



THE HEART OF A CITY 343 

"0 Id Id! Regardez ga! c'est affreuxf* 

There was the butcher's shop, destroyed; and the house 
of poor little Madeleine; and old Christopher's work- 
shop; and the milliner's place, where they used to buy 
their Sunday hats; and that frightful gap where the 
Arcade had been. Truly, poor Amiens had suffered 
martyrdom; though, thank God, the cathedral still 
stood in glory, hardly touched, with only one little shell- 
hole through the roof. 

Terrible was the damage up the rue de Beauvais and 
the streets that went out of it. To one rubbish heap 
which had been a corner house two girls came back. 
Perhaps the French authorities had not had that one 
on their list. The girls came tripping home, with light 
in their eyes, staring about them, ejaculating pity for 
neighbors whose houses had been destroyed. Then sud- 
denly they stood outside their own house and saw that 
the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light 
went out of their eyes. They stood there staring, with 
their mouths open. . . . Some Australian soldiers stood 
about and watched the girls, understanding the drama. 

"Bit of a mess, missy!" said one of them. "Not much 
left of the old home, eh ? " 

The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. 
They climbed up a hillock of bricks and pulled out bits 
of old, famihar things. They recovered the whole of a 
child's perambulator, with its wheels crushed. With an 
air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round to 
the Australians. 

"Pour les bebes!" they cried. 

"While there's Hfe there's hope," said one of the Aus- 
tralians, with sardonic humor. 

So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and Hfe 
came back to the city that had been dead, and the soul 
of the city had survived. I have not seen it since then, 
but one day I hope I shall go back and shake hands with 
Gaston the waiter and say, "Comment (a va^ man 
vieux?" ("How goes it, my old one?") and stroll into 



344 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the bookshop and say, *'Bon jour, mademoiselle!^* and 
walk round the cathedral and see its beauty in moon- 
light again when no one will look up and say, "Gurse 
the moon!" 

There will be many ghosts in the city at night — the 
ghosts of British officers and men who thronged those 
streets in the great war and have now passed on. 



Part Six 

PSYCHOLOGY ON 
THE SOMME 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 



ALL that had gone before was but a preparation for 
xV. what now was to come. Until July i of 1916 the 
British armies were only getting ready for the big battles 
which were being planned for them by something greater 
than generalship — by the fate which decides the doom 
of men. 

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from 
Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rear- 
guards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living 
flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being 
raised. 

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and 
all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but 
experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly 
bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart 
from providing those mistakes by which men learn; 
ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's 
children. They were only diversions of impatience in the 
monotonous routine of trench warfare by which our men 
strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, 
so that the new boys already coming out might learn their 
lessons without more grievous interruption than came 
from the daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees 
were paid. In those two years it was France which 
fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons against the 
enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach 
them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first 
month of '16, it was France which sustained the full 
weight of the German offensive on the western front and 



348 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea of 
biood, above which the French poilus, the "hairy ones," 
stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. 
The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart 
of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from 
many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High 
Command, aghast at their own losses — six hundred thou- 
sand casualties — already conscious, icily, of a dwindling 
man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, 
rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance 
of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or 
other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer 
blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring of 
nations which girdled them. On the west they would 
stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their strength, 
but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by 
that enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the 
back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures 
on the German General Staff), they most feared as their 
future peril — England. They had been fools to let the 
British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the 
folly of the madness by which they had flung the gauntlet 
down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them. 

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. 
We had about six hundred thousand bayonet-men in 
France and Flanders and in England, immense reserves 
to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks before 
the summer foliage turned to russet tints. 

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the 
beginning of the year. Every month I had seen many 
new batteries arrive, with clean harness and yellow straps, 
and young gunners who were quick to get their targets. 
We were strong in "heavies," twelve-inchers, 9.2's, eight- 
inchers, 4.2's, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled 
sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destruc- 
tiveness. Our aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon 
squadron, and our aviators had been trained in the school 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 349 

of General Trenchard, who sent them out over the Ger- 
man lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and 
how to die like little gentlemen. 

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned 
*' buses" — primitive machines which were an easy prey 
to the fast-flying Fokkers who waited for them behind a 
screen of cloud and then "stooped" on them like hawks 
sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer 
came later models, out of date a few weeks after their 
delivery, replaced by still more powerful types more per- 
fectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the 
air were challenging the German champions on equal 
terms, and beating them back from the lines unless they 
flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men 
gained an absolute supremacy by greater daring — there 
was nothing they did not dare — and by equal skill. As a 
rule, and by order, the German pilots flew with more 
caution, not wasting their strength in unequal contests. 
It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back 
again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful 
concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our 
airmen, at a heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down 
a while and blinded his eyes. 

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and 
Amiens, the long trail down the roads of lorries packed 
with wings and the furniture of aircraft factories, gave 
the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this direc- 
tion a merry hell was being prepared. 

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way 
from the coast to the lines. At Etaples and other places 
near Boulogne hospital huts and tents were growing like 
mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing stations 
near the front the wounded — the human wreckage of 
routine warfare — were being evacuated "in a hurry" to 
the base, and from the base to England. They were to 
be cleared out of the way so that all the wards might be 
empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous 
numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying 



350 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

up. There was a sinister suggestion in the solitude that 
was being made for a multitude that was coming. 

"We shall be very busy," said the doctors. 

"We must get all the rest we can now," said the nurses. 

"In a Httle while every bed will be filled," said the 
matrons. 

Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four 
wounded Germans, Wiirtemburgers and Bavarians, too 
ill to move just then. Each of them had lost a leg under 
the surgeon's knife. They were eating strawberries, and 
seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them. 

*' Wie bejinden sie sichF" 

"Ganz zvohl; zvir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung." 

I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard 
where the "shell-shocks" sat about, dumb, or making 
queer, foolish noises, or staring with a look of animal fear 
in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of 
singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts 
of laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so 
mad! 

"We are clearing them out," said the medical officer. 
"There will be many more soon." 

How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. 
It was the only secret, and even that was known in Lon- 
don, where little ladies in society were naming the date, 
"in confidence," to men who were directly concerned with 
it — having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days, 
of certain life. But I believe there were not many officers 
who would have surrendered deliberately all share in 
"The Great Push." In spite of all the horror which these 
young officers knew it would involve, they had to be "in 
it" and could not endure the thought that all their friends 
and all their men should be there while they were "out 
of it." A decent excuse for the safer side of it — yes. A 
staff job, the IntelHgence branch, any post behind the 
actual shambles — and thank God for the luck. But not 
an absolute shirk. 

Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 351 

rows and rows of bell tents and pavilions stained to a 
reddish brown. Small cities of them were growing up 
on the right of the road between Amiens and Albert — at 
Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous - Corbie. I 
thought they might be for troops in reserve until I saw 
large flags hoisted to tall staffs and men of the R. A. M. C. 
busy painting signs on large sheets stretched out on the 
grass. It was always the same sign — the Sign of the Cross 
that was Red. 

There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains 
were travehng on light railways day and night to railroads 
just beyond shell-range. What was all the weight they 
carried? No need to ask. The "dumps" were being 
filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells, covered by 
tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. 
Enormous shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without 
legs. Those were for the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2's. 
There was enough high-explosive force littered along those 
roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map. 

"It does one good to see," said a cheery fellow. "The 
people at home have been putting their backs into it. 
Thousands of girls have been packing those things. Well 
done. Munitions!" 

I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of 
satisfaction that at least when our men attacked they 
would have a power of artillery behind them. It might 
help them to smash through to a finish, if that were the 
only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations. 

My friend was shocked when I said; 

"Curse all munitions!" 

II 

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the 
approach of that new phase of war which they called 
"The Great Push," as though it were to be a glorified 
football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to 
know the thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some 



352 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

sensational adventure. But a man would be a liar if he 
pretended that British troops went forward to the great 
attack with hangdog looks or any visible sign of fear in 
their souls. I think most of them were upKfted by the 
belief that the old days of trench warfare were over for- 
ever and that they would break the enemy's lines by 
means of that enormous gun-power behind them, and get 
him *'on the run." There would be movement, excite- 
ment, triumphant victories — and then the end of the 
war. In spite of all risks it would be enormously better 
than the routine of the trenches. They would be getting 
on with the job instead of standing still and being shot 
at by invisible earth-men. 

"If we once get the Germans in the open we shall go 
straight through them." 

That was the opinion of many young officers at that 
time, and for once they agreed with their generals. 

It seemed to be a question of getting them in the open, 
and I confess that when I studied the trench maps and saw 
the enemy's defensive earthworks thirty miles deep in 
one vast maze of trenches and redoubts and barbed wire 
and tunnels I was appalled at the task which lay before 
our men. They did not know what they were being asked 
to do. 

They had not seen, then, those awful maps. 

We were at the height and glory of our strength. Out 
of England had come the flower of our youth, and out of 
Scotland and Wales and Canada and Australia and New 
Zealand. Even out of Ireland, with the i6th Division 
of the south and west, and the 36th of Ulster. The New 
Armies were made up of all the volunteers who had an- 
swered the call to the colors, not waiting for the conscrip- 
tion by class, which followed later. They were the ardent 
ones, the young men from office, factory, shop, and field, 
university and public school. The best of our intelli- 
gence were there, the noblest of our manhood, the strength 
of our heart, the beauty of our soul, in those battahons 
which soon were to be flung into explosive fires. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 353 

III 

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling 
the old roads behind the front. 

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where 
always there was a coming and going of French and Eng- 
lish soldiers. It was market-day and the Grande Place 
(not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies 
in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over 
their black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly 
the people scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle 
of wheels as a long line of transport wagons came through 
the square. 

"By Jove! . . . Australians!" 

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told 
one at a glance, but without them I should have known. 
They had a distinctive type of their own, which marked 
them out from all other soldiers of ours along those roads 
of war. 

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding 
through the little old market town; British unmistakably, 
yet not English, not Irish, nor Scottish, nor Canadian. 
They looked hard, with the hardness of a boyhood and 
a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the 
softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes 
(especially for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, 
clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy 
grace in the saddle, as though born to riding, and drove 
their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths 
that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle 
and an old woman's table of colored ribbons. 

Those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered men, 
who had come out of the hell of the Dardanelles and the 
burning drought of Egyptian sands, looked wonderfully 
fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the 
eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came 
riding down the street. 

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and 



354 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

good to them (though so old and stale to many of us), 
and after their adventures in the East they found it splen- 
did to be in a civilized country, with water in the sky and 
in the fields, with green trees about them, and flowers in 
the grass, and white people who were friendly. 

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they 
were all at the windows, drinking in the look of the French 
landscape, and one of their officers told me that again 
and again he heard the same words spoken by those lads 
of his. 

**It's a good country to fight for. . . . It's Uke being 
home again." 

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had 
been bad for them during the first weeks in April, when 
the wind had blown cold and rain-clouds had broken into 
sharp squalls. 

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard 
their teeth chatter, but they said they liked a moist 
climate with a bite in the wind, after all the blaze and 
glare of the Egyptian sun. 

One of their pleasures in being there was the oppor- 
tunity of buying sweets! "They can't have too much 
of them," said one of the officers, and the idea that those 
hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had been 
proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me 
an amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, 
and keen as they were, those Australian soldiers were but 
grown-up children with a wonderful simplicity of youth 
and the gift of laughter. 

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried 
on the gas-masks which none of us ever left behind when 
we went near the fighting-line. That horror of war on 
the western front was new to them. 

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the 
Turks, and the gas-masks seemed a joke to the groups 
of AustraHans trying on the headgear in the fields, and 
changing themselves into obscene specters. . . . But one 
man watching them gave a shudder and said, "It's a 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 355 

pity such splendid boys should have to risk this foul way 
of death." They did not hear his words, and we heard 
their laughter again. 

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard 
with a young officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear 
light, which showed the spirit of the man, and as we 
talked he pointed out some of the boys who passed in 
and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work 
on the Peninsula, contemptuous of all risks. Another 
had gone out under heavy fire to bring in a wounded 
friend. . . . **0h, they are great lads!" said the captain 
of the company. "But now they want to get at the 
Germans and finish the job quickly. Give them a fair 
chance and they'll go far." 

They went far, from that time to the end, and fought 
with a simple, terrible courage. 

They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men 
by Regular traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with 
none but the gipsy law in their hearts, intolerant of 
restraint, with no respect for rank or caste unless it 
carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the 
lines, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but 
lovable, human, generous souls when their bayonets were 
not red with blood. Their discipHne in battle was the 
best. They wanted to get to a place ahead. They 
would fight the devils of hell to get there. 

The New-Zeal an ders followed them, with rosy cheeks 
like English boys of Kent, and more gentle manners than 
the other "Anzacs," and the same courage. They went 
far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap. But that, 
in the summer of '16, was far away. 

In those last days of June, before the big battles began, 
the countryside of the Somme valley was filled with splen- 
dor. The mustard seed had spread a yellow carpet in 
many meadows so that they were Fields of the Cloth of 
Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like flowers of blood. 
The hedges about the villages of Picardy were white with 
elderflower and drenched with scent. It was haymaking 



356 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

time and French women and children were tossing the 
hay on wooden pitchforks during hot days which came 
between heavy rains. Our men were marching through 
that beauty, and were conscious of it, I think, and glad 
of Ufe. 

IV 

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed 
between England and the long, straight road which led to 
No Man's Land. The seven-days-leave men were com- 
ing back by every tide, and all other leave was canceled. 

New "drafts" were pouring through the port by tens 
of thousands — all manner of men of all our breed march- 
ing in long columns from the quayside, where they had 
orders yelled at them through megaphones by A. P. M/s, 
R. T. O.'s, A. M. L. O.'s, and other blue-tabbed officers 
who dealt with them as cattle for the slaughter-houses. 
I watched them landing from the transports which came 
in so densely crowded with the human freight that the 
men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in 
barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach 
the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, 
with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clatter- 
ing Hke a tinker's kettle, came down the inclined planK 
and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every 
county; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Aus- 
tralians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, 
West Indian negroes of the Garrison Artillery; Sikhs, 
Pathans, and Dogras of the Indian Cavalry. Some of 
them had been sick and there was a greenish pallor on 
their faces. Most of them were deeply tanned. Many 
of them stepped on the quayside of France for the first 
time after months of training, and I could tell those, 
sometimes, by the furtive look they gave at the crowded 
scene about them, and by a sudden glint in their eyes, a 
faint reflection of the emotion that was in them, because 
this was another stage on their adventure of war, and the 
drawbridge was down at last between them and the 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 357 

enemy. That was all — ^just that look, and lips tightened 
now grimly, and the pack hunched higher. Then they 
fell in by number and marched away, with Red-caps to 
guard them, across the bridge, into the town of Boulogne 
and beyond to the great camp near Etaples (and near 
the hospital, so that German aircraft had a good argu- 
ment for smashing Red Cross huts), where some of them 
would wait until somebody said, "You're wanted." They 
were wanted in droves as soon as the fighting began on 
the first day of July. 

The bun-shops in Boulogne were filled with nurses, 
V. A. D.'s, all kinds of girls in uniforms which glinted 
with shoulder-straps and buttons. They ate large quan- 
tities of buns at odd hours of mornings and afternoons. 
Flying-men and officers of all kinds waiting for trains 
crowded the Folkestone Hotel and restaurants, where 
they spent two hours over luncheon and three hours over 
dinner, drinking red wine, talking "shop" — the shop of 
trench-mortar units, machine-gun sections, cavalry squad- 
rons, air-fighting, gas schools, and anti-gas schools. Regu- 
lar inhabitants of Boulogne, officers at the base, passed 
to inner rooms with French ladies of dangerous appear- 
ance, and the transients envied them and said: "Those 
fellows have all the luck! What's their secret.? How do 
they arrange these cushie jobs?" From open windows 
came the music of gramophones. Through half-drawn 
curtains there were glimpses of khaki tunics and Sam 
Brown belts in juxtaposition with silk blouses and coiled 
hair and white arms. Opposite the Folkestone there was 
a park of ambulances driven by "Scottish women," who 
were always on the move from one part of the town to 
the other. Motor-cars came hooting with staff-officers, 
all aglow in red tabs and arm-bands, thirsty for Httle 
cocktails after a dusty drive. Everywhere in the streets 
and on the esplanade there was incessant saluting. The 
arms of men were never still. It was like the St. Vitus 
disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern 
with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every 

24 



3S8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn 
saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, generals. The 
thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human 
relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men hfted up 
above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensifica- 
tion of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the 
Australians stood otit against it, and went by all officers 
except their own with a careless slouch and a look of "To 
hell with all that handwagging." 

Seated on high stools in the Folkestone, our young 
officers cHnked their cocktails, and then whispered 
together. 

**When's it coming?" 

*'In a few days. . . . I'm for the Gommecourt sector/* 

"Do you think we shall get through.?" 

"Not a doubt of it. The cavalry are massing for a 
great drive. As soon as we make the gap they'll ride 
into the blue." 

"By God! . . . There'll be some slaughter!" 

"I think the old Boche will crack this time." 

"Well, cheerio!" 

There was a sense of enormous drama at hand, and 
the excitement of it in boys' hearts drugged all doubts 
and fears. It was only the older men, and the intro-' 
spective, who suffered from the torture of apprehension. 
Even timid fellows in the ranks were, I imagine, strength- 
ened and exalted by the communal courage of their com- 
pany or battalion, for courage as well as fear is infectious, 
and the psychology of the crowd uplifts the individual to 
immense heights of daring when alone he would be terror- 
stricken. The public-school spirit of pride in a name 
and tradition was in each battalion of the New Army, 
extended later to the division, which became the unit of 
esprit de corps. They must not "let the battalion down." 
They would do their damnedest to get farther than any 
other crowd, to bag more prisoners, to gain more "kudos." 
There was rivalry even among the platoons and the com- 
panies. "A" Company would show "B" Company the 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 359 

way to go! Their sergeant-major was a great fellow! 
Their platoon commanders were fine kids! With any- 
thing like a chance — '* 

In that spirit, as far as I — an outsider — could see and 
hear, did our battalions of boys march forward to *'The 
Great Push," whistling, singing, jesting, until their Hps 
were dry and their throats parched in the dust, and even 
the merriest jesters of all were silent under the weight of 
their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day 
through the beauty of that June in France — thousands of 
men — hundreds of thousands — to the edge of the battle- 
fields of the Somme, where the enemy was intrenched in 
fortress positions and where already, before the last days 
of June, gun-fire was flaming over a vast sweep of country. 



On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles 
which only lulled down at times during two and a half 
years more, when our British armies fought with des- 
perate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning; 
when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace 
month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift 
haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by 
machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire, gassed in thou- 
sands, until all that country became a graveyard; when 
they went forward to new assaults or fell back in rear- 
guard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in 
their first attack no more than one chance in five of 
escape, next time one chance in four, then one chance in 
three, one chance in two, and after that no chance at all, 
on the line of averages, as worked out by their experience 
of luck. More boys came out to take their places, and 
more, and more, conscripts following volunteers, younger 
brothers following elder brothers. Never did they revolt 
from the orders that came to them. Never a battalion 
broke into mutiny against inevitable martyrdom. They 
were obedient to the command above them. Their dis- 



36o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

cipline did not break. However profound was the de- 
spair of the individual — and it was, I know, deep as the 
wells of human tragedy in many hearts — the mass moved 
as it was directed, backward or forward, this way and 
that, from one shambles to another, in mud and in blood, 
with the same massed valor as that which uphfted them 
before that first day of July with an intensified pride in 
the fame of their divisions, with a more eager desire for 
public knowledge of their deeds, with a loathing of war's 
misery, with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a 
refusal in their couls to acknowledge defeat or to stop 
this side of victory. In each battle there were officers 
and men who risked death dehberately, and in a kind of 
ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of 
the number of these feats the record of them is monoto- 
nous, dull, familiar. The mass followed their lead, and 
even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many, as 
in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far 
as the center of the fury before their knees gave way or 
they dropped dead. 

Each wave of boyhood that came out from England 
brought a new mass of physical and spiritual valor as 
great as that which was spent, and in the end it was an 
irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers and 
swept through in a rush to victory — to victory which we 
gained at the cost of nearly a miUion dead, and a high 
sum of living agony, and all our wealth, and a spiritual 
bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that now England 
is for a time sick to death and drained of her old pride 
and power. 

VI 

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness 
and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment 
which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group 
of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, look- 
ing over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, 
on the left side of the German salient, and then, by cross- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 361 

ing the road, to Fricouit, Mametz, and Montauban on 
the southern side. From Albert westward past Thiepval 
Wood ran the Httle river of the Ancre, and on the German 
side the ground rose steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle, 
and to Thiepval Chateau above the wood. It was a 
formidable defensive position — one fortress girdled by line 
after line of trenches, and earthwork redoubts, and deep 
tunnels, and dugouts in which the German troops could 
live below ground until the moment of attack. The 
length of our front of assault was about twenty miles 
round the side of the salient to the village of Bray, on the 
Somme, where the French joined us and continued the 
battle. 

From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of 
the German positions, and beyond, now and then, when 
the smoke of shell-fire drifted, I caught glimpses of green 
fields and flower patches beyond the trench lines, and 
church spires beyond the range of guns rising above 
clumps of trees in summer foliage. Immediately below, 
in the foreground, was the village of Albert, not much 
ruined then, with its red-brick church and tower from 
which there hung, head downward, the Golden Virgin 
with her Babe outstretched as though as a peace-offering 
over all this strife. That leaning statue, which I had 
often passed on the way to the trenches, was now re- 
vealed brightly with a golden glamour, as sheets of flame 
burst through a heavy veil of smoke over the valley. In 
a field close by some troops were being ticketed with 
yellow labels fastened to their backs. It was to distin- 
guish them so that artillery observers might know them 
from the enemy when their turn came to go into the 
battleground. Something in the sight of those yellow 
tickets made me feel sick. . . . Away behind, a French 
farmer was cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, 
sweeping strokes. Only now and then did he stand to 
look over at the most frightful picture of battle ever 
seen until then by human eyes. I wondered, and wonder 
still, what thoughts were passing through that old brain 



'362 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

to keep him at his work, quietly, steadily, on the edge of 
hell. For there, quite close and clear, was hell, of man's 
making, produced by chemists and scientists, after cen- 
turies in search of knowledge. There were the fires of 
hate, produced out of the passion of humanity after a 
thousand years of Christendom and of progress in the 
arts of beauty. There was the devil-worship of our poor, 
damned human race, where the most civilized nations of 
the world were on each side of the bonfires. It was worth 
watching by a human ant. 

I remember the noise of our guns as all our batteries 
took their parts in a vast orchestra of drum-fire. The 
tumult of the field-guns merged into thunderous waves. 
Behind me a fifteen-inch — "Grandmother" — fired single 
strokes, and each one was an enormous shock. Shells 
were rushing through the air like droves of giant birds 
with beating wings and with strange wailings. The Ger- 
man lines were in eruption. Their earthworks were being 
tossed up, and fountains of earth sprang up between 
columns of smoke, black columns and white, which stood 
rigid for a few seconds and then sank into the banks of 
fog. Flames gushed up red and angry, rending those 
banks of mist with strokes of lightning. In their light 
I saw trees falling, branches tossed like twigs, black 
things hurtling through space. In the night before the 
battle, when that bombardment had lasted several days 
and nights, the fury was intensified. Red flames darted 
hither and thither like little red devils as our trench- 
mortars got to work. Above the slogging of the guns 
there were louder, earth-shaking noises, and volcanoes of 
earth and fire spouted as high as the clouds. One con- 
vulsion of this kind happened above Usna Hill, with a 
long, terrifying roar and a monstrous gush of flame. 

"What is that?" asked some one. 

"It must be the mine we charged at La Boisselle. The 
biggest that has ever been." 

It was a good guess. When, later in the battle, I stood 
by the crater of that mine and looked into its gulfs I 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 363 

wondered how many Germans had been hurled into eter- 
nity when the earth had opened. The grave was big 
enough for a battahon of men with horses and wagons, 
below the chalk of the crater's lips. Often on the way to 
Bapaume I stepped off the road to look into that white 
gulf, remembering the moment when I saw the gust of 
flame that rent the earth about it. 



VII 

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of 
the Somme battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, 
and it was not until a day or two later that certain awful 
rumors I had heard from wounded men and officers who 
had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt, Thiepval, 
and Serre were confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic 
disaster on that side of the battle-line. 

The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of 
it, came to me when I saw the German rockets rising 
beyond the villages of Mametz and Montauban and our 
barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines of 
German trenches, and our support troops moving for- 
ward in masses to captured ground. We had broken 
through! By the heroic assault of our English and 
Scottish troops — West Yorks, Yorks and Lanes, Lincolns, 
Durhams, Northumberland FusiHers, Norfolks and Berk- 
shires, Liverpools, Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal 
Scots, all those splendid men I had seen marching to their 
lines — we had smashed through the ramparts of the Ger- 
man fortress, through that maze of earthworks and tun- 
nels which had appalled me when I saw them on the maps, 
and over which I had gazed from time to time from our 
front-line trenches when those places seemed impreg- 
nable. I saw crowds of prisoners coming back under 
escort — fifteen hundred had been counted in the first 
day — and they had the look of a defeated army. Our 
lightly wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting 
and laughing as they came down behind the lines, wearing 



364 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

German caps and helmets. From Amiens civilians strag- 
gled out along the roads as far as they were allowed by 
military police, and waved hands and cheered those boys 
of ours. "Five VAngleterre!'' cried old men, raising their 
hats. Old women wept at the sight of those gay wounded 
(the lightly touched, glad of escape, rejoicing in their 
luck and in the glory of life which was theirs still) and 
cried out to them with shrill words of praise and exultation. 

"Nous les aurons — les sales Boches! Ah, Us sont foutus, 
ces bandits! C'est la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats 
anglais!" 

Victory ! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting- 
men, and of women excited by the sight of those ban- 
daged heads, those bare, brawny arms splashed with blood, 
those laughing heroes. 

It looked like victory (in those days, as war correspond- 
ents, we were not so expert in balancing the profit and 
loss as afterward we became) when I went into Fricourt 
on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who had 
clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the York- 
shires and Lincolns of the 21st Division (that division 
which had been so humiliated at Loos and now was won- 
derful in courage), and when the Manchesters and Gor- 
dons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and 
repulsed fierce counter-attacks. 

It looked like victory, because of the German dead that 
lay there in their battered trenches and the filth and stench 
of death over all that mangled ground, and the enormous 
destruction wrought by our guns, and the fury of fire 
which we were still pouring over the enemy's lines from 
batteries which had moved forward. 

I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, 
astonished by their depth and strength. Our men did 
not build like this. This German industry was a rebuke 
to us — yet we had captured their work and the dead 
bodies of their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed 
by our bombers, who had flung down hand-grenades. I 
drew back from those fat corpses. They looked mon- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 365 

strous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul litter of 
clothes, stick-bombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of 
dead lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung 
into chaos by that bombardment I had seen. They had 
been bayoneted. I remember one man — ^an elderly jfellow 
— sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his hands 
half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been 
stabbed through the belly and was stone dead. . . . Vic- 
tory! . . . some of the German dead were young boys, too 
young to be killed for old men's crimes, and others might 
have been old or young. One could not tell, because 
they had no faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in 
rags and uniforms. Legs and arms lay separate, without 
any bodies thereabouts. 

Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. 
Young Gordons and Manchesters of the 30th Division, 
they had been caught by blasts of machine-gun fire — but 
our dead seemed scarce in the places where I walked. 

Victory.? . . . Well, we had gained some ground, and 
many prisoners, and here and there some guns. But as 
I stood by Montauban I saw that our line was a sharp 
salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping 
sharply southward to Fricourt. O God! had we only 
made another salient after all that monstrous effort? To 
the left there was fury at La Boisselle, where a few 
broken trees stood black on the sky-line on a chalky ridge. 
Storms of German shrapnel were bursting there, and 
machine-guns were firing in spasms. In Contalmaison, 
round a chateau which stood high above ruined houses, 
shells were bursting with thunderclaps — our shells. Ger- 
man gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our 
lines with barrage-fire — it roamed up and down this side 
of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now and then 
shells smashed among the houses and barns of Fricourt, 
and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of 
"hate." Our men were working like ants in those muck 
heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle. From a 
ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a tall crucifix 



366 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

between two trees, which our men called the "Poodles/* 
a body of men came down and shrapnel burst among 
them and they fell and disappeared in tall grass. Stretcher- 
bearers came slowly through Fricourt village with living 
burdens. Some of them were German soldiers carrying 
our wounded and their own. Walking wounded hobbled 
slowly with their arms round each other's shoulders, Ger- 
mans and English together. A boy in a steel hat stopped 
me and held up a bloody hand. "A bit of luck!" he said. 
"Fm off, after eighteen months of it." 

German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers 
as their escort. I saw distant groups of them, and a shell 
smashed into one group and scattered it. The living ran, 
leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by daring fellows 
drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place, and 
loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a 
tunnel there. 

It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and 
shambles. But was it Victory? ... I knew then that it 
was only a breach in the German bastion, and that on 
the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black tragedy. 

VIII 

On the left, where the 8th and loth Corps were direct- 
ing operations, the assault had been delivered by the 4th, 
29th, 36th, 49th, 32d, 8th, and 56th Divisions. 

The positions in front of them were Gommecourt and 
Beaumont Hamel on the left side of the River Ancre, and 
Thiepval Wood on the right side of the Ancre leading up 
to Thiepval Chateau on the crest of the cliff. These were 
the hardest positions to attack, because of the rising 
ground and the immense strength of the enemy's earth- 
works and tunneled defenses. But our generals were 
confident that the gun-power at their disposal was suffi- 
cient to smash down that defensive system and make an 
easy way through for the infantry. They were wrong. 
In spite of that tornado of shell-fire which I had seen 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 367 

tearing up the earth, many tunnels were still unbroken, 
and out of them came masses of German machine-gunners 
and riflemen, when our infantry rose from their own 
trenches on that morning of July ist. 

Our guns had shifted their barrage forward at that 
moment, farther ahead of the infantry than was after- 
ward allowed, the men being trained to follow close to the 
lines of bursting shells, trained to expect a number of 
casualties from their own guns — it needs some training! 
— in order to secure the general safety gained by keeping 
the enemy below ground until our bayonets were round 
his dugouts. 

The Germans had been trained, too, to an act of amaz- 
ing courage. Their discipline, that immense power of 
discipline which dominates men in the mass, was strong 
enough to make them obey the order to rush through 
that barrage of ours, that advancing wall of explosion, 
and, if they lived through it, to face our men in the open 
with massed machine-gun fire. So they did; and as Eng- 
lish, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh battahons of our assault- 
ing divisions trudged forward over what had been No 
Man's Land, machine-gun bullets sprayed upon them, 
and they fell like grass to the scythe. Line after line of 
men followed them, and each line crumpled, and only 
small groups and single figures, seeking comradeship, hur- 
ried forward. German machine-gunners were bayoneted 
as their thumbs were still pressed to their triggers. In 
German front-line trenches at the bottom of Thiepval 
Wood, outside Beaumont Hamel and on the edge of 
Gommecourt Park, the field-gray men who came out of 
their dugouts fought fiercely with stick-bombs and rifles, 
and our officers and men, in places where they had strength 
enough, clubbed them to death, stuck them with bayo- 
nets, and blew their brains out with revolvers at short 
range. Then those English and Irish and Scottish troops, 
grievously weak because of all the dead and wounded 
behind them, struggled through to the second German 
line, from which there came a still fiercer rattle of machine- 



368 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

and rifle-fire. Some of them broke through that line, too, 
and went ahead in isolated parties across the wild crater 
land, over chasms and ditches and fallen trees, toward 
the highest ground, which had been their goal. Nothing 
was seen of them. They disappeared into clouds of 
smoke and flame. Gunner observers sav/ rockets go up 
in far places — our rockets — showing that outposts had 
penetrated into the German lines. Runners came back 
— survivors of many predecessors who had fallen on the 
way — ^with scribbled messages from company officers. One 
came from the Essex and King's Own of the 4th Division, 
at a place called Pendant Copse, southeast of Serre. 
"For God's sake send us bombs." It was impossible to 
send them bombs. No men could get to them through 
the deep barrage of shell-fire which was between them 
and our supporting troops. Many tried and died. 

The Ulster men went forward toward Beaumont Hamel 
with a grim valor which was reckless of their losses. 
Beaumont Hamel was a German fortress. Machine-gun 
fire raked every yard of the Ulster way. Hundreds of 
the Irish fell. I met hundreds of them wounded — tall, 
strong, powerful men, from Queen's Island and Belfast 
factories, and Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scots. 

"They gave us no chance," said one of them — a ser- 
geant-major. "They just murdered us." 

But bunches of them went right into the heart of the 
German positions, and then found behind them crowds 
of Germans who had come up out of their tunnels and 
flung bombs at them. Only a few came back alive in the 
darkness. 

Into Thiepval Wood men of ours smashed their way 
through the German trenches, not counting those who 
fell, and killing any German who stood in their way. 
Inside that wood of dead trees and charred branches they 
reformed, astonished at the fewness of their numbers. 
Germans coming up from holes in the earth attacked them, 
and they held firm and took two hundred prisoners. 
Other Germans came closing in Hke wolves, in packs, and 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 369 

to a German officer who said, "Surrender!" our men 
shouted, "No surrender!" and fought in Thiepval Wood 
until most were dead and only a few wounded crawled 
out to tell that tale. 

The Londoners of the 56th Division had no luck at all. 
Theirs was the worst luck because, by a desperate courage 
in assault, they did break through the German lines at 
Gommecourt. Their left was held by the London Rifle 
Brigade. The Rangers and the Queen Victoria Rifles — 
the old "Vies" — formed their center. Their right was 
made up by the London Scottish, and behind came the 
Queen's Westminsters and the Kensingtons, who were 
to advance through their comrades to a farther objective. 
Across a wide No Man's Land they suff'ered from the 
bursting of heavy crumps, and many fell. But they 
escaped annihilation by machine-gun fire and stormed 
through the upheaved earth into Gommecourt Park, kill- 
ing many Germans and sending back batches of prisoners. 
They had done what they had been asked to do, and 
started building up barricades of earth and sand-bags, 
and then found they were in a death-trap. There were 
no troops on their right or left. They had thrust out into 
a salient, which presently the enemy saw. The German 
gunners, with deadly skill, boxed it round with shell-fire, 
so that the Londoners were inclosed by explosive walls, 
and then very slowly and carefully drew a line of bursting 
shells up and down, up and down that captured ground, 
ravaging its earth anew and smashing the life that 
crouched there — London life. 

I have written elsewhere (in The Battles of the Somme) 
how young officers and small bodies of these London 
men held the barricades against German attacks while 
others tried to break a way back through that mur- 
derous shell-fire, and how groups of lads who set out 
on that adventure to their old lines were shattered so 
that only a few from each group crawled back alive, 
wounded or unwounded. 

At the end of the day the Germans acted with chivalry. 



370 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

which I was not allowed to tell at the time. The general 
of the London Division (Phihp Howell) told me that the 
enemy sent over a message by a low-flying airplane, pro- 
posing a truce while the stretcher-bearers worked, and 
offering the service of their own men in that work of mercy. 
This offer was accepted without reference to G. H. Q., 
and German stretcher-bearers helped to carry our wounded 
to a point where they could be reached. 

Many, in spite of that, remained lying out in No Man's 
Land, some for three or four days and nights. I met one 
man who lay out there wounded, with a group of comrades 
more badly hurt than he was, until July 6th. At night 
he crawled over to the bodies of the dead and took their 
water-bottles and "iron" rations, and so brought drink 
and food to his stricken friends. Then at last he made 
his way through roving shells to our lines and even then 
asked to lead the stretcher-bearers who volunteered on a 
search-party for his "pals." 

"Physical courage was very common in the war," said 
a friend of mine who saw nothing of war. "It is proved 
that physical courage is the commonest quality of man- 
kind, as moral courage is the rarest." But that soldier's 
courage was spiritual, and there were many like him in 
the battles of the Somme and in other later battles as 
tragic as those. 

IX 

I have told how, before "The Big Push," as we called the 
beginning of these battles, little towns of tents were built 
under the sign of the Red Cross. For a time they were 
inhabited only by medical officers, nurses, and orderlies, 
busily getting ready for a sudden invasion, and spending 
their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the 
decoration of their camps by chalk-lined paths, red 
crosses painted on canvas or built up in red and white 
chalk on leveled earth, and flowers planted outside the 
tents — all very pretty and picturesque in the sunshine 
and the breezes over the valley of the Somme. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 371 

On the morning of battle the doctors, nurses, and order- 
lies waited for their patients and said, "Now we sha'n't 
be long!" They were merry and bright with that won- 
derful cheerfulness which enabled them to face the tragedy 
of mangled manhood without horror, and almost, it 
seemed, without pity, because it was their work, and they 
were there to heal what might be healed. It was with a 
rush that their first cases came, and the M. O.'s whistled 
and said, *'Ye gods! how many more?" Many more. 
The tide did not slacken. It became a spate brought 
down by waves of ambulances. Three thousand wounded 
came to Daours on the Somme, three thousand to Corbie, 
thousands to Dernancourt, Heilly, Puchevillers, Touten- 
court, and many other "clearing stations." 

At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until 
there was no more room. The wounded were laid down 
on the grass to wait their turn for the surgeon's knife. 
Some of them crawled over to haycocks and covered 
themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them 
sleeping there, like dead men. Here and there shell- 
shocked boys sat weeping or moaning, and shaking with 
an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and did not 
give any groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in 
groups, telling their adventures, cursing the German 
machine-gunners. Young officers spoke in a different 
way, and with that sporting spirit which they had learned 
in public schools praised their enemy. 

"The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows — topping. 
Fight until they're killed. They gave us hell." 

Each man among those thousands of wounded had 
escaped death a dozen times or more by the merest flukes 
of luck. It was this luck of theirs which they hugged 
with a kind of laughing excitement. 

"It's a marvel I'm here! That shell burst all round me. 
Killed six of my pals. I've got through with a blighty 
wound. No bones broken. . . . God! What luck!" 

The death of other men did not grieve them. They 
could not waste this sense of luck in pity. The escape of 



372 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

their own individuality, this possession of life, was a glori- 
ous thought. They were alive! What luck! What luck! 

We called the hospital at Corbie the "Butcher's Shop." 
It was in a pretty spot in that little town with a big church 
whose tall white towers looked down a broad sweep of the 
Somme, so that for miles they were a landmark behind 
the battlefields. Behind the Hnes during those first bat- 
tles, but later, in 191 8, when the enemy came nearly to 
the gates of Amiens, a stronghold of the Australians, who 
garrisoned it and sniped pigeons for their pots off the top 
of the towers, and took no great notice of "whizz-bangs" 
which broke through the roofs of cottages and barns. It 
was a safe, snug place in July of '16, but that Butcher's 
Shop at a corner of the square was not a pretty spot. 
After a visit there I had to wipe cold sweat from my fore- 
head, and found myself trembling in a queer way. It was 
the medical officer — a colonel — who called it that name. 
"This is our Butcher's Shop," he said, cheerily. "Come 
and have a look at my cases. They're the worst possible; 
stomach wounds, compound fractures, and all that. We 
lop off Hmbs here all day long, and all night. You've no 
idea!" 

I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The 
M. O. could not understand my reluctance to see his show. 
He put it down to my desire to save his time — and ex- 
plained that he was going the rounds and would take it 
as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded weakly, 
and cursed myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued, 
what men are brave enough to suffer I ought to have the 
courage to see. ... I saw and sickened. 

These were the victims of "Victory" and the red fruit 
of war's harvest-fields. A new batch of "cases" had just 
arrived. More were being brought in on stretchers. 
They were laid down in rows on the floor-boards. The 
colonel bent down to some of them and drew their blankets 
back, and now and then felt a man's pulse. Most of 
them were unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 373 

of dying men. Their skin was already darkening to the 
death-tint, which is not white. They were all plastered 
with a gray clay and this mud on their faces was, in some 
cases, mixed with thick clots of blood, making a hard 
incrustation from scalp to chin. 

"That fellow won't last long," said the M. O., rising 
from a stretcher. "Hardly a heart-beat left in him. 
Sure to die on the operating-table if he gets as far as that. 
. . . Step back against the wall a minute, will you?" 

We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while 
ambulance - men brought in a line of stretchers. No 
sound came from most of those bundles under the blankets, 
but from one came a long, agonizing wail, the cry of an 
animal in torture. 

"Come through the wards," said the colonel. "They're 
pretty bright, though we could do with more space and 
light." 

In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, 
and in each bed lay a young British soldier, or part of a 
young British soldier. There was not much left of one 
of them. Both his legs had been amputated to the thigh, 
and both his arms to the shoulder-blades. 

"Remarkable man, that," said the colonel. "Simply 
refuses to die. His vitality is so tremendous that it is 
putting up a terrific fight against mortality. . . . There's 
another case of the same kind; one leg gone and the other 
going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in. 
* You're not going to kill me, doctor,' he said. 'I'm going 
to stick it through.' What spirit, eh?" 

I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with 
bright eyes. His right leg was uncovered, and supported 
on a board hung from the ceiling. Its flesh was like that 
of a chicken badly carved — white, flabby, and in tatters. 
He thought I was a surgeon, and spoke to me pleadingly: 

"I guess you can save that leg, sir. It's doing fine. I 
should hate to lose it," 

I murmured something about a chance for it, and the 
M. O. broke in cheerfully. 



374 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

**You won't lose it if I can help it. How's your pulse? 

. . Oh, not bad. Keep cheerful and we'll pull you 
through." 

The man smiled gallantly. 

"Bound to come off," said the doctor as we passed to 
another bed. "Gas gangrene. That's the thing that 
does us down." 

In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, 
ivho had been lopped of limbs a few hours ago or a few 
minutes, some of them unconscious, some of them strangely 
and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes as though 
staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged 
nearer. 

"Yes," said the M. 0., "they look bad, some of 
'em, but youth is on their side. I dare say seventy- 
five per cent, will get through. If it wasn't for gas 
gangrene — " 

He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling 
at the nurse who felt his pulse. 

"Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn't he? But 
we shall have to cut higher up. The gas again. I'm 
afraid he'll be dead before to-morrow. Come into the 
operating-theater. It's very well equipped." 

I refused that invitation. I walked stiffly out of the 
Butcher's Shop of Corbie past the man who had lost both 
arms and both legs, that vital trunk, past rows of men 
lying under blankets, past a stench of mud and blood and 
anesthetics, to the fresh air of the gateway, where a 
column of ambulances had just arrived with a new harvest 
from the fields of the Sornme. 

"Come in again, any time!" shouted out the cheery 
colonel, waving his hand. 

I never went again, though I saw many other Butcher's 
Shops in the years that followed, where there was a great 
carving of human flesh which was of our boyhood, while 
the old men directed their sacrifice, and the profiteers 
grew rich, and the fires of hate were stoked up at patriotic 
banquets and in editorial chairs. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 375 



The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial 
success on the right caused a sudden pause in the opera- 
tions, camouflaged by small attacks on minor positions 
around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The Lincolns 
and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out 
German machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the 
sunken road at Fricourt. The Dorsets, Manchesters, 
Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusihers, and Bor- 
derers of the 3 2d Division were in possssion of La Bois- 
selle and clearing out communication trenches to which 
the Germans were hanging on with desperate valor. The 
2ist Division — Northumberland Fusiliers, Durhams, 
Yorkshires — were making a flanking attack on Contal- 
maison, but weakened after their heavy losses on the 
first day of battle. The fighting for a time was local, in 
small copses — Lozenge Wood, Peak Wood, Caterpillar 
Wood, Acid Drop Copse — where English and German 
troops fought ferociously for yards of ground, hummocks 
of earth, ditches. 

G. H. Q. had been shocked by the disaster on the left 
and the failure of all the big hopes they had held for a 
break-through on both sides of the German positions. 
Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief had 
decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for 
strengthening the line and to abandon the great off'ensive. 
It was believed by officers I met that Sir Henry Raw- 
linson was arguing, persuading, in favor of continued 
assaults on the grand scale. 

Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Com- 
mand I do not know; it was visible to all of us that for 
some days there were uncertainty of direction, hesitation, 
conflicting orders. On July 7th the 17th Division, under 
General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a whole 
battalion of the Prussian Guard hurried up from Valen- 
ciennes and, thrown on to the battlefield without maps 
or guidance, walked into the barrage which covered the 



I'jG NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

advance of our men and were almost annihilated. But 
although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, 
in an attack which I was able to see, they were smashed 
out of it again by storms of fire followed by masses of 
men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh 
were attacking Mametz Wood. 

They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a 
Napoleonic battle, "hke turnips." Battalion command- 
ers received orders in direct conflict with one another. 
Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then retired, 
and left to lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire. 
The 17th Division, under General Pilcher, did not attack 
at the expected time. There was no co-ordination of 
divisions; no knowledge among battalion officers of the 
strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were 
involved. 

"Goodness knows what's happening," said an officer I 
met near Mametz. He had been waiting all night and 
half a day with a body of troops who had expected to go 
forward, and were still hanging about under harassing 
fire. 

On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that 
attack very clearly, so clearly that I could almost count 
the bricks in the old chateau set in a little wood, and saw 
the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct hit of a 
fifteen-inch shell. At four o'clock in the afternoon our 
guns concentrated on the village, and under the cover of 
that fire our men advanced on three sides of it, hemmed 
it in, and captured it with the garrison of the I22d 
Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of hell 
inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and 
this time German shells smashed into the chateau and 
the cottages and left nothing but rubbish heaps of brick 
through which a few days later I went walking with the 
smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being 
shelled in that place. 

Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume 
road, there had been a village called Ovillers. It was no 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 377 

longer there. Our guns haa removed every trace of it, 
except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick. The Germans 
had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches 
and their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th 
Division was ordered to drive them out — a division of 
English county troops, including the Sussex, Essex, Bed- 
fords, and Middlesex — and those country boys of ours 
fought their way among communication trenches, bur- 
rowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth 
and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken 
rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, 
and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard 
over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of 
small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days 
of this one hundred and forty men of the 3d Prussian 
Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water, 
raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their 
hands up. Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of primitive 
earth-men like human beasts. Yet our men were not 
beastlike. They came out from those places — if they 
had the luck to come out — apparently unchanged, with- 
out any mark of the beast on them, and when they cleansed 
themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of their 
shirts, and assembled in a village street behind the lines, 
they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing had 
happened to their souls — though something had really 
happened, as now we know. 

It was not until July 14th that our High Command 
ordered another general attack after the local fighting 
which had been in progress since the first day of battle. 
Our field-batteries, and some of our "heavies," had moved 
forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison — 
where German shells came searching for them all day 
long — and new divisions had been brought up to relieve 
some of the men who had been fighting so hard and so 
long. It was to be an attack on the second German line 
of defense on the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand 
and Bazentin le Petit to Longueval on the right and Del- 



378 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ville Wood. I went up in the night to see the bombard- 
ment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its 
backwash, and I remember now the darkness of villages 
behind the lines through which our cars crawled, until 
we reached the edge of the battlefields and saw the sky 
rent by incessant flames of gun-fire, while red tongues of 
flames leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was 
on fire, and the two Bazentins, and another belt of land 
in France, so beautiful to see, even as I had seen it first 
between the sand-bags of our parapets, was being deliv- 
ered to the charcoal-burners. 

I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its 
deviltry, but one picture which I passed on the way to 
the battlefield could not then be told. Yet it was sig- 
nificant of the mentality of our High Command, as was 
afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim. It 
proved the strange unreasoning optimism which still lin- 
gered in the breasts of old-fashioned generals in spite of 
what had happened on the left on the first day of July, 
and their study of trench maps, and their knowledge of 
German machine-guns. By an old mill-house called the 
Moulin Vivier, outside the village of Meaulte, were masses 
of cavalry — Indian cavalry and Dragoons — drawn up 
densely to leave a narrow passageway for field-guns and 
horse-transport moving through the village, which was in 
utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues on their 
horses, motionless, dead silent. Now and again there was 
a jangle of bits. Here and there a British soldier lit a 
cigarette and for a second the little flame of his match 
revealed a bronzed face or glinted on steel helmets. 

Cavalry! ... So even now there was a serious purpose 
behind the joke of English soldiers who had gone forward 
on the first day, shouting, "This way to the gap!" and 
in the conversation of some of those who actually did ride 
through Bazentin that day. 

A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground 
and skirted Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged 
a machine-gun in a cornfield, and killed the gunners. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 379 

Germans rounded up by them clung to their stirrup 
leathers crying: "Pity! Pity!" The Indians lowered their 
lances, but took prisoners to show their chivalry. But it 
was nothing more than a beau geste. It was as futile and 
absurd as Don Quixote's charge of the windmill. They 
were brought to a dead halt by the nature of the ground 
and machine-gun fire which killed their horses, and lay 
out that night with German shells searching for their 
bodies. 

One of the most disappointed men in the army was on 
General Haldane's staff. He was an old cavalry officer, 
and this major of the old, old school (belonging in spirit 
to the time of Charles Lever) was excited by the thought 
that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one 
of those who swore that if he had his chance he would 
"ride into the blue." It was the chance he wanted and 
he nursed his way to it by delicate attentions to General 
Haldane. The general's bed was not so comfortable as 
his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put 
a bunch of flowers on the general's table in his dugout. 

"You seem very attentive to me, major," said the 
general, smelling a rat. 

Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead 
a squadron round Delville Wood? Could he take that 
ride into the blue.'' He would give his soul to do it. 

"Get on with your job," said General Haldane. 

That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry 
to the behef that they would be of real value in a warfare 
of trench lines and barbed wire, but for a long time later 
they were kept moving backward and forward between 
the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the 
great incumbrance of the roads, until they were "guyed" 
by the infantry, and irritable, so their officers told me, to 
the verge of mutiny. Their irritability was cured by dis- 
mounting them for a turn in the trenches, and I came 
across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston 
Steps, this side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work. 

In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that 



38o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

fighting in the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have 
written with many details of each day's scene in my col- 
lected despatches called The Battles of the Somme. There 
is little that I can add to those word-pictures which I 
wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the 
ruin of those fields, except a summing-up of their effect 
upon the mentality of our men, and upon the Germans 
who were in the same "blood-bath," as they called it, 
and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of 
our military machine. 

Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowl- 
edge gained in the years that followed, it seems clear that 
our High Command was too prodigal in its expenditure 
of life in small sectional battles, and that the army corps 
and divisional staffs had not established an efficient sys- 
tem of communication with the fighting units under their 
control. It seemed to an outsider like myself that a num- 
ber of separate battles were being fought without reference 
to one another in different parts of the field. It seemed as 
though our generals, after conferring with one another 
over telephones, said, "All right, tell So-and-so to have a 
go at Thiepval," or, "To-day we will send such-and-such 
a division to capture Delville Wood," or, "We must get 
that line of trenches outside Bazentin." Orders were 
drawn up on the basis of that decision and passed down 
to brigades, who read them as their sentence of death, 
and obeyed with or without protest, and sent three or four 
battalions to assault a place which was covered by German 
batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open out 
a tempest of fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, 
and to tear up the woods and earth in that neighborhood 
if our men gained ground. If the whole battle-line moved 
forward the German fire would have been dispersed, but 
in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood and 
Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast 
concentration of explosives which plowed up our men. 

So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost 
several times and became "Devil's" Wood to men who 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 381 

lay there under the crash and fury of massed gun-fire 
until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious 
brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when 
relieved by another brigade ordered to take their turn in 
that devil's caldron, or to recapture it when German 
bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed in 
the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen 
trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead 
and their dead to keep them company. In Delville Wood 
the South African Brigade of the 9th Division was cut to 
pieces, and I saw the survivors come out with few officers 
to lead them. 

In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, 
there had been great slaughter of English troops and 
Welsh. The i8th Division and the 38th suffered horri- 
bly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to 
pieces before these South Africans. And after that came 
High Wood. . . . All that was left of High Wood in the 
autumn of 1916 was a thin row of branchless trees, but 
in July and August there were still glades under heavy 
foliage, until the branches were lopped off and the leaves 
scattered by our incessant fire. It was an important 
position, vital for the enemy's defense, and our attack 
on the right flank of the Pozieres Ridge, above Bazentin 
and Delville Wood, giving on the reverse slope a fine 
observation of the enemy's lines above Martinpuich and 
Courcellette away to Bapaume. For that reason the 
Germans were ordered to hold it at all costs, and many 
German batteries had registered on it to blast our men 
out if they gained a foothold on our side of the slope or 
theirs. 

So High Wood became another hell, on a day of great 
battle — September 14, 1916 — when for the first time 
tanks were used, demorahzing the enemy in certain 
places, though they were too few in number to strike a 
paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High 
Wood at frightful cost and then were blown out of it. 
Other divisions followed them and found the wood stuffed 



382 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

with machine-guns which they had to capture through 
hurricanes of bullets before they crouched in craters amid 
dead Germans and dead English, and then were blown 
out like the Londoners, under shell-fire, in which no 
human life could stay for long. 

The 7th Division was cut up there. The 33d Division 
lost six thousand men in an advance against uncut wire 
in the wood, which they were told was already captured. 

Hundreds of men were vomiting from the effect of 
gas-shells, choking and bhnded. Behind, the transport 
wagons and horses were smashed to bits. 

The divisional staffs were often ignorant of what was 
happening to the fighting-men when the attack was 
launched. Light signals, rockets, heliographing, were of 
small avail through the dust- and smoke-clouds. For- 
ward observing officers crouching behind parapets, as I 
often saw them, and sometimes stood with them, watched 
fires burning, red rockets and green, gusts of flame, and 
bursting shells, and were doubtful what to make of it alL 
Telephone wires trailed across the ground for miles, were 
cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive. 
Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of 
war. It was all a vast tangle and complexity of strife. 

On July 17th I stood in a tent by a staff-officer who was 
directing a group of heavy guns supporting the 3d Divi- 
sion. He was tired, as I could see by the black lines under 
his eyes and tightly drawn lips. On a camp-table in 
front of him, upon which he leaned his elbows, there was 
a telephone apparatus, and the little bell kept ringing as 
we talked. Now and then a shell burst in the field out- 
side the tent, and he raised his head and said: "They 
keep crumping about here. Hope they won't tear this 
tent to ribbons. . . . That sounds Hke a gas-shell." 

Then he turned to the telephone again and listened to 
some voice speaking. 

"Yes, I can hear you. Yes, go on. 'Our men seen 
leaving High Wood.' Yes. 'Shelled by our artillery.' 
Are you sure of that? I say, are you sure they were our 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 383 

men? Another message. Well, carry on. *Men digging 
on road from High Wood southeast to Longueval.' Yes, 
I've got that. *They are our men and not Boches.' 
Oh, hell ! — Get off the line. Get off the line, can't you ? 
. . . *Our men and not Boches.* Yes, I have that. 
'Heavily shelled by our guns.'" 

The staff-officer tapped on the table with a lead-pencil 
a tattoo, while his forehead puckered. Then he spoke 
into the telephone again. 

"Are you there, ^Heavies' ? . . . Well, don't disturb those 
fellows for half an hour. After that I will give you new 
orders. Try and confirm if they are our men." 

He rang off and turned to me. 

*'That's the trouble. Looks as if we had been pound- 
ing our own men Hke hell. Some damn fool reports 
*Boches.' Gives the reference number. Asks for the 
'Heavies'. Then some other fellow says: *Not Boches. For 
God's sake cease fire!' How is one to tell?" 

I could not answer that question, but I hated the idea 
of our men sent forward to capture a road or a trench or 
a wood and then *' pounded" by our guns. They had 
enough pounding from the enemy's guns. There seemed 
a missing link in the system somewhere. Probably it 
was quite inevitable. 

Over and over again the wounded swore to God that 
they had been shelled by our own guns. The Londoners 
said so from High Wood. The Australians said so from 
Mouquet Farm. The Scots said so from Longueval! 
They said: "Why the hell do we get murdered by British 
gunners? What's the good of fighting if we're slaugh- 
tered by our own side?" 

In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade 
fire from German batteries. But often it happened ac- 
cording to the way of that telephone conversation in the 
tent by Bronfay Farm. 

The difference between British soldiers and German 
soldiers crawling over shell-craters or crouching below the 
banks of a sunken road was no more than the difference 



384 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

between two tribes of ants. Our flying scouts, however 
low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun bul- 
lets, often mistook khaki for field gray, and came back 
with false reports which led to tragedy. 

XI 

People who read my war despatches will remember my 
first descriptions of the tanks and those of other corre- 
spondents. They caused a sensation, a sense of excite- 
m-ent, laughter which shook the nation because of the 
comicaUty, the grotesque surprise, the possibilit}" of 
quicker victon.^, which caught hold of the imagination of 
people who heard for the first time of those new engines 
of war, so beasthke in appearance and performance. 
The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the censor- 
ship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and 
exact definition, so that we had to compare them to giant 
toads, mammoths, and prehistoric animals of all kinds. 
Our accounts did, however, reproduce the psychological 
effect of the tanks upon the British troops when these 
engines appeared for the first time to their astonished 
gaze on September 13th. Our soldiers roared with laugh- 
ter, as I did, when the}- saw them lolloping up the roads. 
On the morning of the great battle of September 15th 
the presence of the tanks going into action excited all 
the troops along the front with a sense of comical relief 
in the midst of the grim and deadly business of attack. 
!Men followed them, laughing and cheering. There was a 
wonderful thrill in the airman's message, "Tank walking 
up the High Street of Flers with the British army cheer- 
ing behind." Wounded boys whom I met that morning 
grinned in spite of their wounds at our first word about 
the tanks. "Crikey!" said a cockney lad of the 47th 
Division. "I can't help laughing every time I think of 
them tanks. I saw them stamping down German 
machine-guns as though they were wasps' nests." The 
adventures of Creme de Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 385 

Byng Boys, on both sides of the Bapaume road, when 
they smashed down barbed wire, dimbed over trenches, 
sat on German redoubts, and received the surrender of 
German prisoners who held their hands up to these mon- 
sters and cried, '' Kamerad!'' were hke fair^-tales of war 
by H. G. Wells. 

Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw 
in those battles of the Somme, and afterward, more griev- 
ously, in the Cambrai salient and Flanders, when the tanks 
were put out of action by direct hits of field-guns and 
nothing of humankind remained in them but the charred 
bones of their gallant crews. 

Before the battle in September of '16 I talked with the 
pilots of the first tanks, and although they were con- 
vinced of the value of these new engines of war and were 
out to prove it, they did not disguise from me nor from. 
their own souls that they were going forth upon a perilous 
adventure with the odds of luck against them. I remem- 
ber one young pilot — a tiny fellow like a jocke^^ who 
took me on one side and said, "I want you to do me a 
favor," and then scribbled down his mother's address 
and asked me to write to her if *' anything" happened 
to him. 

He and other tank officers were anxious. They had 
not complete confidence in the steering and control of 
their engines. It was a difficult and clumsy kind of gear, 
which was apt to break down at a critical moment, as I 
saw when I rode in one on their field of maneuver. These 
first tanks were only experimental, and the tail arrange- 
ment was very weak. Worse than all mechanical troubles 
was the short-sighted policy of some authority at G. H, Q., 
who had insisted upon A. S. C. drivers being put to this 
job a few days before the battle, without proper training. 

"It is mad and murderous," said one of the officers. 
"These fellows may have pluck, all right — I don't doubt 
it — but they don't know their engines, nor the double 
steering trick, and they have never been under shell-fire. 
It is asking for trouble." 



386 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

As it turned out, the A. S. C. drivers proved their 
pluck, for the most part, splendidly, but many tanks 
broke down before they reached the enemy's Hues, and 
in that action and later battles there were times when 
they bitterly disappointed the infantry commanders and 
the troops. 

Individual tanks, commanded by gallant young officers 
and served by brave crews, did astounding feats, and 
some of these men came back dazed and deaf and dumb, 
after forty hours or more of fighting and maneuvering 
within steel walls, intensely hot, filled with the fumes of 
their engines, jolted and banged about over rough ground, 
and steering an uncertain course, after the loss of their 
**tails," which had snapped at the spine. But there had 
not been anything like enough tanks to secure an anni- 
hilating surprise over the enemy as afterward was attained 
in the first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had 
been buoyed up with the hope that at last the machine- 
gun evil was going to be scotched were disillusioned and 
dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines 
or nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge 
forward under the flail of machine-gun bullets fromnearth- 
work redoubts. It was a failure in generalship to give 
away our secret before it could be made effective. 

I remember sitting in a mess of the Gordons in the 
village of Franvillers along the Albert road, and listening 
to a long monologue by a Gordon officer on the future of 
the tanks. He was a dreamer and visionary, and his 
fellow-officers laughed at him. 

"A few tanks are no good," he said. "Forty or fifty 
tanks are no good on a modern battle-front. We want 
hundreds of tanks, brought up secretly, fed with ammuni- 
tion by tank carriers, bringing up field-guns and going 
into action without any preliminary barrage. They can 
smash through the enemy's wire and get over his trenches 
before he is aware that an attack has been organized. 
Up to now all our offensives have been futile because of 
our preliminary advertisement by prolonged bombard- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 387 

ment. The tanks can bring back surprise to modern war- 
fare, but we must have hundreds of them." 

Prolonged laughter greeted this speech. But the Celtic 
dreamer did not smile. He was staring into the future. 
. . . And what he saw was true, though he did not live to 
see it, for in the Cambrai battle of November nth the 
tanks did advance in hundreds, and gained an enormous 
surprise over the enem}^, and led the way to a striking 
victory, which turned to tragedy because of risks too 
lightly taken. 

XII 

One branch of our military machine developed with 
astonishing rapidity and skill during those Somme battles. 
The young gentlemen of the Air Force went ''all out" for 
victory, and were reckless in audacity. How far they 
acted under orders and against their own judgment of 
what was sensible and sound in fighting-risks I do not 
know. General Trenchard, their supreme chief, believed 
m an aggressive policy at all costs, and was a Napoleon 
in this war of the skies, intolerant of timidity, not squeam- 
ish of heavy losses if the balance were tipped against the 
enemy. Some young flying-men complained to me bit- 
terly that they were expected to fly or die over the Ger- 
man Hnes, whatever the weather or whatever the risks. 
Many of them, after repeated escapes from anti-aircraft 
shells and hostile craft, lost their nerve, shirked another 
journey, found themselves crying in their tents, and were 
sent back home for a spell by squadron commanders, with 
quick observation for the breaking-point; or made a few 
more flights and fell to earth like broken birds. 

Sooner or later, apart from rare cases, every man was 
found to lose his nerve, unless he lost his Hfe first. That 
was a physical and mental law. But until that time 
these flying-men were the knights-errant of the war, and 
most of them did not need any driving to the risks they 
took with boyish recklessness. 

They were mostly boys — babes, as they seemed to me, 



'I 



388 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

when I saw them in their tents or dismounting from their 
machines. On "dud" days, when there was no visibiHty 
at all, they spent their leisure hours joy-riding to Amiens 
or some other town where they could have a "binge." 
They drank many cocktails and roared with laughter over 
bottles of cheap champagne, and flirted with any girl 
who happened to come within their orbit. If not allowed 
beyond their tents, they sulked like baby Achilles, reading 
novelettes, with their knees hunched up, playing the 
gramophone, and ragging each other. 

There was one child so young that his squadron leader 
would not let him go out across the battle-lines to chal- 
lenge any German scout in the clouds or do any of the 
fancy "stunts" that were part of the next day's program. 
He went to bed sulkily, and then came back again, in his 
pajamas, with rumpled hair. 

"Look here, sir," he said. "Can't I go.? I've got my 
wings. It's perfectly rotten being left behind." 

The squadron commander, who told me of the tale, 
yielded. 

"All right. Only don't do any fool tricks." 

Next morning the boy flew off^, played a lone hand, 
chased a German scout, dropped low over the enemy's 
lines, machine-gunned infantry on the march, scattered 
them, bombed a train, chased a German motor-car, and 
after many adventures came back alive and said, "I've 
had a rare old time!" 

On a stormy day, which loosened the tent poles and 
slapped the wet canvas, I sat in a mess with a group of 
flying-oflicers, drinking tea out of a tin mug. One boy, 
the youngest of them, had just brought down his first 
"Hun." He told me the tale of it with many details, his 
eyes alight as he described the fight. They had maneu- 
vered round each other for a long time. Then he shot 
his man en passant. The machine crashed on our side 
of the lines. He had taken off" the iron crosses on the 
wings, and a bit of the propeller, as mementoes. He 
showed me these things (while the squadron commander, 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 389 

who had brought down twenty-four Germans, winked at 
me) and told me he was going to send them home to hang 
beside his college trophies. ... I guessed he was less than 
nineteen years old. Such a kid! ... A few days later, 
when I went to the tent again, I asked about him. 

"How's that boy who brought down his first *Hun'?" 

The squadron commander said: 

"Didn't you hear? He's gone west. Brought down 
in a dog-fight. He had a chance of escape, but went back 
to rescue a pal ... a nice boy." 

They became fatalists after a few fights, and believed 
in their luck, or their mascots — teddy-bears, a bullet 
that had missed them, china dolls, a girl's lock of hair, 
a silver ring. Yet at the back of their brains, most of 
them, I fancy, knew that it was only a question of time 
before they "went west," and with that subconscious 
thought they crowded in all life intensely in the hours 
that were given to them, seized all chance of laughter, of 
wine, of every kind of pleasure within reach, and said 
their prayers (some of them) with great fervor, between 
one escape and another, like young Paul Bensher, who has 
revealed his soul in verse, his secret terror, his tears, his 
hatred of death, his love of life, when he went bombing 
over Bruges. 

On the mornings of the battles of the Somme I saw them 

as the heralds of a new dey of strife flying toward the 

lines in the first light of dawn. When the sun rose its 

rays touched their wings, made them white like cabbage 

butterflies, or changed them to silver, all asparkle. I 

saw them fly over the German positions, not changing 

their course. Then all about them burst black puff's of 

German shrapnel, so that many times I held my breath 

because they seemed in the center of the burst. But 

generally when the cloud cleared they were flying again, 

until they disappeared in the mists over the enemy's 

country. There they did deadly work, in single fights 

with German airmen, or against great odds, until they 

had an air space to themselves and skimmed the earth 
26 



390 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

like albatrosses in low flight, attacking machine-gun nests, 
killing or scattering the gunners by a burst of bullets from 
their Lewis guns, dropping bombs on German wagon 
transports, infantry, railway trains (one man cut a train 
in half and saw men and horses falling out), and ammuni- 
tion-dumps, directing the fire of our guns upon living 
targets, photographing new trenches and works, bombing 
villages crowded with German troops. That they struck 
terror into these German troops was proved afterward 
when we went into Bapaume and Peronne and many 
villages from which the enemy retreated after the battles 
of the Somme. Everywhere there were signboards on 
which was written ^'Flieger Schutz!" (aircraft shelter) or 
German warnings of: " Keep to the sidewalks. This road 
is constantly bombed by British airmen." 

They were a new plague of war, and did for a time gain 
a complete mastery of the air. But later the Germans 
learned the lesson of low flying and night bombing, and 
in 1917 and 1918 came back in greater strength and made 
the nights horrible in camps behind the lines and in vil- 
lages, where they killed many soldiers and more civilians. 

The infantry did not believe much in our air supremacy 
at any time, not knowing what work was done beyond 
their range of vision, and seeing our machines crashed in 
No Man's Land, and hearing the rattle of machine-guns 
from hostile aircraft above their own trenches. 

"Those aviators of ours," a general said to me, **are 
the biggest liars in the world. Cocky fellows claiming 
impossible achievements. What proof can they give of 
their preposterous tales? They only go into the air 
service because they haven't the pluck to serve in the 
infantry." 

That was prejudice. The German losses were proof 
enough of our men's fighting skill and strength, and Ger- 
man prisoners and German letters confirmed all their 
claims. But we were dishonest in our reckoning from 
first to last, and the British public was hoodwinked about 
our losses. "Three of our machines are missing." "Six 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 391 

of our machines are missing." Yes, but what about the 
machines which crashed in No Man's Land and behind 
our Hues? They were not missing, but destroyed, and 
the boys who had flown in them were dead or broken. 

To the end of the war those aviators of ours searched 
the air for their adventures, fought often against over- 
whelming numbers, killed the German champions in 
single combat or in tourneys in the sky, and let down 
tons of high explosives which caused great death and 
widespread destruction; and in this work they died like 
flies, and one boy's life — one of those laughing, fatalistic, 
intensely living boys — was of no more account in the 
general sum of slaughter than a summer midge, except as 
one little unit in the Armies of the Air. 



XIII 

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to 
understand the origin of laughter and to get into touch 
with the mainsprings of gaiety. The sharp contrast be- 
tween normal ethics and an abnormality of action pro- 
vides a grotesque point of view arousing ironical mirth. 
It is probable also that surroundings of enormous tragedy 
stimulate the sense of humor of the individual, so that 
any small, ridiculous thing a^umes the proportion of 
monstrous absurdity. It is also Hkely — certain, I think 
— that laughter is an escape from terror, a liberation of 
the soul by mental explosion, from the prison walls of 
despair and brooding. In the Decameron of Boccaccio a 
group of men and women encompassed by plague retired 
into seclusion to tell one another mirthful immoralities 
which stirred their laughter. They laughed while the 
plague destroyed society around them and when they 
knew that its foul germs were on the prowl for their own 
bodies. ... So it was in this war, where in many strange 
places and in many dreadful days there was great laughter. 
I think sometimes of a night I spent with the medical 
oflicers of a tent hospital in the fields of the Somme dur- 



/~- 



392 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ing those battles. With me as a guest went a modern 
FalstafF, a "ton of flesh," who "sweats to death and 
lards the lean earth as he walks along." 

He was a man of many anecdotes, drawn from the sinks 
and stews of life, yet with a sense of beauty lurking under 
his coarseness, and a voice of fine, sonorous tone, which 
he managed with art and a melting grace. 

On the way to the field hospital he had taken more 
than one nip of whisky. His voice was well oiled when 
he sang a greeting to a medical major in a florid burst of 
melody from Italian opera. The major was a little Irish 
medico who had been through the South African War 
and in tropical places, where he had drunk fire-water to 
kill all manner of microbes. He suff'ered abominably 
from asthma and had had a heart-seizure the day before 
our dinner at his mess, and told us that he would drop 
down dead as sure as fate between one operation and 
another on "the poor, bloody wounded" who never ceased 
to flow into his tent. But he was in a laughing mood, 
and thirsty for laughter-making liquid. He had two 
whiskies before the dinner began to wet his whistle. His 
fellow-officers were out for an evening's joy, but nervous 
of the colonel, an austere soul who sat at the head of the 
mess with the look of a man afraid that merriment might 
reach outrageous heights beyond his control. A courte- 
ous man he was, and rather sad. His presence for a time 
acted as a restraint upon the company, until all restraint 
was broken by the FalstafF with me, who told soul-crash- 
ing stories to the little Irish major across the table and 
sang love lyrics to the orderly who brought round the 
cottage pie and pickles. There was a tall, thin young 
surgeon who had been carving up living bodies all day 
and many days, and now listened to that fat rogue with 
an intensity of delight that lit up his melancholy eyes, 
watching him gravely between gusts of deep laughter, 
which seemed to come from his boots. There was an- 
other young surgeon, once of Barts', who made himself 
the cup-server of the fat knight and kept his wine at the 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 393 

brim, and encouraged him to fresh audacities of anec- 
dotry, with a humorous glance at the colonel's troubled 
face. . . . The colonel was forgotten after dinner. The 
little Irish major took the lid off the boiling pot of 
mirth. He was entirely mad, as he assured us, be- 
tween dances of a wild and primitive type, stories of 
adventure in far lands, and spasms of asthmatic cough- 
ing, when he beat his breast and said, "A pox in my 
bleeding heart!" 

Falstaff was playing Juliet to the Romeo of the tall 
young surgeon, singing falsetto like a fat German angel 
dressed in loose-fitting khaki, with his belt undone. 
There were charades in the tent. The boy from Barts' 
did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a 
rival bird, of a cow coming through a gate, of a general 
addressing his troops (most comical of all). Several 
glasses were broken. The corkscrew was disregarded as 
a useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated 
against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the crown- 
ing episode of the evening when the little major was 
dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff 
was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the stupefied 
colonel; v/hen the boy, once of Barts', was roaring like 
a lion under the mess table, and when the tall, melancholy 
surgeon was at the top of the tent pole, scratching himself 
like a gorilla in his native haunts. . . . Outside, the field 
hospital was quiet, under a fleecy sky with a crescent 
moon. Through the painted canvas of the tent city 
candle-light glowed with a faint rose-colored light, and 
the Red Cross hung limp above the camp where many 
wounded lay, waking or sleeping, tossing in agony, dying 
in unconsciousness. Far away over the fields, rockets 
were rising above the battle-lines. The sky was flicker- 
ing with the flush of gun-fire. A red glare rose and spread 
below the clouds where some ammunition-dump had been 
exploded. . . . Old Falstaff fell asleep in the car on the 
way back to our quarters, and I smiled at the memory of 
great laughter in the midst of tragedy. 



394 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

XIV 

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low 
ridge in a territory forty miles wide by more than twenty 
miles deep, during five months of fighting, was enormous 
in its intensity and prolongation of slaughter, wounding, 
and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war. As 
an eye-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. 
I saw day by day the tidal waves of wounded limping 
back, until two hundred and fifty thousand men had 
passed through our casualty clearing stations, and then 
were not finished. I went among these men when the 
blood was wet on them, and talked with hundreds of 
them, and heard their individual narratives of escapes 
from death until my imagination was saturated with the 
spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, 
downy countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged 
by gun-fire so that the white chalk of its subsoil was flung 
above the earth and grass in a wide, sterile stretch of 
desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched by deep 
trenches, whose walls were hideously upheaved by ex- 
plosive fire, and littered yard after yard, mile after mile, 
with broken wire, rifles, bombs, unexploded shells, rags 
of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies, and all the filth 
of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin or blown 
clean off the map. I walked into such villages as Contal- 
maison, Martinpuich, Le Sars, Thilloy, and at last Ba- 
paume, when a smell of burning and the fumes of explo- 
sives and the stench of dead flesh rose up to one's nostrils 
and one's very soul, when our dead and German dead 
lay about, and newly wounded came walking through 
the ruins or were carried shoulder high on stretchers, and 
consciously and subconsciously the living, unwounded 
men who went through these places knew that death 
lurked about them and around them and above them, 
and at any second might make its pounce upon their own 
flesh. I saw our men going into battle with strong bat- 
talions and comino: out of it with weak battalions. I saw 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 395 

them in the midst of battle at Thiepval, at Contalmaison, 
at Guillemont, by Loup art Wood, when they trudged 
toward Hnes of German trenches, bunching a Httle in 
groups, dodging shell-bursts, falHng in single figures or 
in batches, and fighting over the enemy's parapets. I 
sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after 
battle, saw their bodies gathered up for burial, heard 
their snuffle of death in hospital, sat by their bedside when 
they were sorely wounded. So the full tragic drama of 
that long conflict on the Somme was burned into my 
brain and I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am still 
seared with its remembrance, and shall always be. 

But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man 
would be a liar if he refused to admit the heroism, the 
gallantry of youth, even the gaiety of men in these infer- 
nal months. Psychology on the Somme was not simple 
and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not 
their dominating emotion, except in the worst hours. 
Men hated this fighting, but found excitement in it, often 
exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of all their 
senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men 
became jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw some 
of them, but others rejoiced when they saw our shells 
plowing into the enemy's earthworks, laughed at their 
own narrow escapes and at grotesque comicalities of this 
monstrous deviltry. The officers were proud of their 
men, eager for their honor and achievement. The men 
themselves were in rivalry with other bodies of troops, 
and proud of their own prowess. They were scornful of 
all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged 
his courage and power. They were quick to kill him, 
yet quick also to give him a chance of life b};' surrender, 
and after that were — nine times out of ten — chivalrous 
and kindly, but incredibly brutal on the rare occasions 
when passion overcame them at some tale of treachery. 
They had the pride of the skilled laborer in his own craft, 
as machine-gunners, bombers, raiders, trench-mortar- 
men, and were keen to show their skill, whatever the 



396 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

risks. They were healthy animals, with animal courage 
as well as animal fear, and they had, some of them, a 
spiritual and moral fervor which bade them risk death to 
save a comrade, or to save a position, or to kill the fear 
that tried to fetter them, or to lead men with greater 
fear than theirs. They lived from hour to hour and for- 
got the peril or the misery that had passed, and did not 
forestall the future by apprehension unless they were of 
sensitive mind, with the worst quality men might have 
in modern warfare — imagination. 

They trained themselves to an intense egotism within 
narrow boundaries. Fifty yards to the left, or five hun- 
dred, men were being pounded to death by shell-fire. 
Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men were being 
mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time being 
their particular patch was quiet. It was their luck. 
Why worry about the other fellow.? The length of a 
traverse in a ditch called a trench might make all the 
difference between heaven and hell. Dead bodies were 
being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had 
smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty 
mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and scooped 
out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop 
them out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism 
seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dan- 
gerous places when I saw them in the line. In a little 
way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent, taking only 
a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found 
myself using this self-complacency. They were strafing 
on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very 
nasty for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! 
But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank 
Heaven for that! 

"Here," said an elderly officer — one of those rare 
exalted souls who thought that death was a little thing 
to give for one's country's sake — "here we may be killed 
at any moment!" 

He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 397 

voice, as though announcing glad tidings to a friend who 
was a war artist camouflaged as a lieutenant and new to 
the scene of battle. 

"But," said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat 
nervously, *'I don't want to be killed! I hate the idea 
of it!" 

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was ab- 
normal. The normal man, soldier without camouflage, 
had no use for death at all, unless it was in connection 
with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He 
hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought 
ferociously, desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet 
there were times, many times, v/hen he paid not the 
slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly 
specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he 
thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, 
and exchanged a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There 
were other times when, in a state of m.ental exaltation, or 
spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted 
regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost 
miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but 
impelled to do as he did by the passion within him — pas- 
sion of love, passion of hate, passion of fear, or passion of 
pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders, 
the heroes, and groups followed them sometim.es because 
of their intensity of purpose and the infection of their 
emotion, and the comfort that came from their real or 
apparent self-confidence in frightful situations. Those 
who got through were astonished at their own courage. 
Many of them became convinced consciously or subcon- 
sciously that they were immune from shells and bullets. 
They walked through harassing fire with a queer sense of 
carelessness. They had escaped so often that some of 
them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until, perhaps, 
one day something snapped in their nervous system, as 
often it did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the 
lines, or a wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, 
gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men differed wonder- 



398 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

fully In their nerve-resistance, and it was no question of 
difference in courage. 

In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In 
the mass they seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of 
all the abomination of that Somme fighting our troops 
before battle and after battle — a few days after — looked 
bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy 
in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, 
heroism in the mass. It was only when one spoke to 
the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second, 
or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom one 
talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for 
his job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that 
was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a 
fate that forced him to go on in this way of Hfe, the re- 
membrance of a life more beautiful which he had aban- 
doned — all mingled with those other qualities of pride 
and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which 
made up the strange complexity of his psychology. 

XV 

It was a colonel of the North StafFordshires who re- 
vealed to me the astounding behef that he was "immune" 
from shell-fire, and I met other men afterward with the 
same conviction. He had just come out of desperate 
fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his bat- 
talion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and 
sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, 
without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imagina- 
tive light; a stern, ruthless man. He vv^as bitter in his 
speech to me because the North StafFords were never 
mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was 
due to some personal spite — not knowing the injustice of 
our military censorship under the orders of G. H. Q. 

"Why the hell don't we get a word.?" he asked. 
"Haven't we done as well as anybody, died as much?" 

I promised to do what I could — which was nothing — • 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 399 

to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and 
later was amazingly candid in self-revelation. 

*'I have a mystical power," he said. "Nothing will 
ever hit me as long as I keep that power which comes 
from faith. It is a question of absolute belief in the dom- 
ination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage 
unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside 
explosive shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter 
they must obey my intelligence. They are powerless to 
resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal 
Spirit, as I am.'* 

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. 
I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising. 
We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time 
or another. It was the unusual form of madness that 
astonished me. I envied him his particular "kink." I 
wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He 
claimed another peculiar form of knowledge. He knew 
before each action, he told me, what officers and men of 
his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes 
and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake. 
. . . He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it 
worried him. 

There were many men who had a conviction that they 
would not be killed, although they did not state it in the 
terms expressed by the colonel of the North StafFord- 
shires, and it is curious that in some cases I know they 
were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a 
general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure 
to fall, that being the reverse side of the argument. 

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of 
death at many times and in many places, and I remember 
one group of friends on the Somme who revealed that 
quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran 
just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, 
on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 
8th-ioth Gordons were there, after their fight through 



400 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Longueval and over the ridge. It was the h'ttle crowd 
I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was 
Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battahon head- 
quarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug- 
out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there 
were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. 
Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-lire. Legs 
and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay 
half buried. Hea\^ crumps came howling through the 
sky and bursting ^\-ith enormous noise here, there, and 
ever\"\vhere over that vast, desolate battlefield, with its 
clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's 
hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John 
Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a 
fine, sturdy, gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he 
climbed over sand-bags, walked on the top of communi- 
cation trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirt- 
ing round hedges of barbed wive, apparently unconscious 
of the "crumps" that were bursting around. I found 
laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where 
the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was cour- 
teous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that 
I should go up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. 
It was no use putting one's head into trouble without 
reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blow- 
ing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John 
Wood was insistent that I should meet "old Thorn,'* 
afterward in command of the battalion. He had just 
been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. 
So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open 
again. Long lines of Jocks were digging a support treach 
— digging with a kind of rhythmic movement as they 
threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them 
was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as 
though asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of 
the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up against 
the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with 
his steel hat on the back of his head — a handsome, laugh- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME . 401 

ing figure. He did not look like a man who had just been 
buried and dug out again. 

"It was a narrow shave," he said. "A beasth' shell 
covered me with a ton of earth. . . . Have a cigarette, 
won't you?" 

We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other 
young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and 
said: "Jolly weather, isn't it.' WTiat do \'ou think of 
our little show.'" Not one of them gave a glance at the 
line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They 
told me some of the funny things that had happened 
lately in the battahon, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. 
They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat them. 
*' Well, good morning! Must get on with the job." There 
was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred 
of this life, so near to death. The}' seemed to like it. . . . 
They did not really like it. They only made the best of 
it, without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of 
battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The 
colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the 
Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof 
in his manner, a little "fe}"." He was annoyed with three 
of his officers who had come back late from three days' 
Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like school- 
boys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter 
words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that 
they must prepare to go into the line again under special 
orders. \Miat about the store of bombs, small-arms am.- 
munition, machine-guns .' 

The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at 
one another as though to say: "\Miat does the old man 
mean? Is this true?" One of them became rather pale, 
and there was a look of tragic resignation in his eyes. 
Another said, "Hell!" in a whisper. The adjutant an- 
swered the colonel's questions in a formal way, but think- 
ing hard and studying the colonel's face anxiously. 

"Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, 
sir? At once?" 



402 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

The colonel laughed. 

"Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field- 
day for training." 

The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. 
Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the "old man's" 
leg-pulling. . . . No, it was clear they did not find any real 
joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line 
trench as the most desirable place of residence. 

XVI 

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of 
the pitiful and comic — among a division (the 35th) known 
as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been 
rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of 
their diminutive stature, which was on an average five 
feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them 
came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, 
being the dwarfed children of industrial England and 
its mid- Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, 
banded together in a battahon of the Middlesex Regiment. 
They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived 
as a division at the port of Boulogne. 

"Name of a dog!" said the quayside loungers. "Eng- 
land is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last 
reserves!" 

" But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!" exclaimed others. 

"It is terrible that they should send these little ones," 
said kind-hearted fishwives. 

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded 
them, they became smart and brisk in the ranks. They 
saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched with quick 
little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to 
see them strutting up and down as sentries outside divi- 
sional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their 
wee bodies. In trench warfare they did well — though 
the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the top 
— and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 403 

I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight 
than ours) Hke ants struggling with a stick of straw. In 
actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could 
not carry all that burden of fighting-kit — steel helmet, 
rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags — with 
which other troops went into action. So they were used 
as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and 
other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there 
these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and 
crouched in the cover they made under damnable fire, 
until many of them were blown to bits. There was no 
"glory'* in their job, only filth and blood, but they held 
the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a 
chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they 
rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been 
taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they 
brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were 
like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of LilHput and 
disgusted with that humiliation. I met the whole crowd 
of them after that adventure, as they sat, half naked, 
picking the lice out of their shirts, and the conversation 
I had with them remains in my memory because of its 
grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were ex- 
cited and emotional, these stunted men. They cursed 
the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern 
dialects. There was one fellow — the jester of them all — 
whose language would have made the poppies blush. 
With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque 
imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his 
mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them 
into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He 
cursed the name of *' glory.'* He advocated a trade- 
unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there 
was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshe- 
vism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to 
cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disem- 
bowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town 
and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him 



404 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his head in 
the earth with shells bursting around him, or prodding 
Germans with a bayonet. "Oh," said that five-foot hero, 
"there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war. 
What's human life? What's the value of one man's 
throat? We're trained up as murderers — I don't dislike 
it, mind you — and after the war we sha'n't get out of the 
habit of it. It '11 come nat'ral like!" 

He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further 
audacities by a group of comrades who roared with laugh- 
ter and said: "Go it. Bill! That's the stuff!" Among 
these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, 
or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their 
eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as 
though they suffered from water on the brain. . . . Many 
of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, 
as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked 
his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, 
the degenerates, and said at each prod, "You can go. . . . 
You. . . You. . . ." The Bantam Division ceased to exist. 

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote 
went the round. A Bantam died — of disease (".and he 
would," said General Haldane) — and a comrade came to 
see his corpse. 

"Shut ze door ven you come out," said the old woman 
of his billet. "Fermez la porte, mon vieux." 

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came 
downstairs much moved by grief. 

"I've seed poor Bill," he said. 

"As-tu ferme la porte?" said the old woman, anxiously. 

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked 
the reason of it. 

"C'est a cause du chat!" said the old woman. "Ze 
cat. Monsieur, 'e 'ave 'ad your friend in ze passage tree 
time already to-day. Trois fois!" 

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They 
were volunteers to a man, and some of them with as 
much courage as soldiers twice their size. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 405 

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican 
'padre at Longueval. It was Father Hall of Mirfield, 
attached to the South African Brigade. He came out to 
a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which 
could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the 
wounded with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering 
horribly from thirst, which made their tongues swell and 
set their throats on fire. 

"Water!" they cried. "Water! For Christ's sake, 
water!" 

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, 
under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men 
when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues 
lolling out. There was one German officer there in a 
shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver 
handy, and he was a dead shot. 

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face 
and figure of that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets 
snapping about him, the upright, fearless way in which 
he crossed that way of death, held back the trigger-finger 
of the German officer and he let him pass. He passed 
many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, 
and he went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot 
tea, which he made from the well-water for men in agony. 

XVII 

During these battles I saw thousands of German pris- 
oners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by 
permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of 
them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of bat- 
tle when they came along under escort. Some of them 
looked degraded, bestial men. One could imagine them 
guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the mass they 
seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our 
own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not 
quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their 
position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their 



4o6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry in 
the prison-camps and established their own discipline, 
and gave very little trouble if well handled. In each 
crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect Eng- 
lish, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, 
or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most 
because it was easiest, but I know enough German to 
talk with the others, and I found among them all the same 
loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to its causes, 
the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them. 
The officers were different. They lost a good deal of 
their arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all 
that Germany had done, and almost to the last professed 
to believe that Germany would win. Their sense of 
caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the 
same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour 
in the same inclosures with them. They regarded them, 
for the most part, as inferior beings. And there were 
castes even among the officers. I remember that in the 
last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, 
these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry 
officers and would not mix with them. One of them 
paced up and down all night alone, and all next day, stiff 
in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking 
to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many 
officers of infantry regiments. 

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after 
the blood of battle was out of their eyes, with a good- 
natured kindness that astonished the Germans themselves. 
I have seen them filling German water-bottles at consid- 
erable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big 
batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. "Here, hold 
my rifle, Fritz," said one of our men, getting down from 
a truck-train to greet a friend. 

An officer standing by took notice of this. 

"Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to 
guard your prisoners?" 

Our man was astonished. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 407 

"Lor* bless you, sir, they don't want no guarding. 
They're glad to be took. They guard themselves." 

"Your men are extraordinary," a German officer told 
me. "They asked me whether I would care to go down 
at once or wait till the barrage had passed." 

He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his com- 
fort. It was in the early days of the Somme fighting, and 
crowds of our men stood on the banks above a sunken 
road, watching the prisoners coming down. This officer 
who spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted 
to see it and handle it. 

"Will they give it back again.?" he asked, nervously, 
fumbling at the ribbon. 

"Certainly," I assured him. 

He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who 
passed it from one to the other and then back to the 
owner. 

"Your men are extraordinary," he said. "They are 
wonderful." 

One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field 
of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw 
walking away from La Boisselle when that place was 
smoking with shell-bursts. An English soldier was on 
each side of him, and each man carried a hand-bag, while 
this black-bearded giant chatted with them. 

It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and 
spoke to one of the men. 

"Who's this.? Why do you carry his bags?" 

"Oh, we're giving him special privileges," said the man. 
"He stayed behind to look after our wounded. Said his 
job was to look after wounded, whoever they were. So 
there he's been, in a dugout bandaging our lads; and no 
joke, either. It's hell up there. We're glad to get out 
of it." 

I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. 
He discussed the philosophy of the war simply and with 
what seemed like sincerity. 

"This war!" he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. "We 



4o8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

go on killing one another — to no purpose. Europe is being 
bled to death and will be impoverished for long years. 
We Germans thought it was a war for Kultur — our civil- 
ization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur, against 
religion, against all civilization." 

"How will it end.?" I asked him. 

*^I see no end to it," he answered. "It is the suicide 
of nations. Germany is strong, and England is strong, 
and France is strong. It is impossible for one side to 
crush the other, so when is the end to come ? " 

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward 
who could see no end of the massacre. They believed 
the war would go on until living humanity on all sides 
revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 
191 8, when at last the end came in sight, by German de- 
feat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest 
optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were 
glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as 
it ended. Defeat? What did that matter.? Was it 
worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleed- 
ing to death? 

XVIII 

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood 
lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of 
September — six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in 
the history of the world until that time. The Australians 
dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm, 
where the Germans refused to be routed from their tun- 
nels, and up to the Windmill on the high ground of 
Pozieres, for which there was unceasing slaughter on both 
sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and 
again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that 
mound of forsaken brick, which I saw as a reddish cone 
through flame and smoke. 

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France 
had proved their quality. They had come believing that 
nothing could be worse than their ordeal in the Darda- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 409 

nelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the last word 
in frightfulness. The intensity of the shell-fire under 
which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them. Many 
of their wounded told me that it had broken their nerve. 
They would never fight again without a sense of horror. 

"Our men are more highly strung than the English," 
said one Australian officer, and I was astonished to hear 
these words, because those Australians seemed to me 
without nerves, and as tough as gristle in their fiber. 

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged 
with fire that the earth was finely powdered. They 
stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by yard, and held its 
crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches 
as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their 
living flesh. In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand 
casualties, and Pozieres now is an Australian graveyard, 
and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of 
that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau 
and the slopes below. Many English boys of the Sussex, 
West Kents, Surrey, and Warwick regiments, in the i8th 
Division, died at their side, not less patient in sacrifice, 
not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th 
Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of 
the 47th and 56th Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the 
right of them, on the way to Martinpuich, and Eaucourt 
I'Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and Longueval, 
and Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and North- 
umberland Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were 
earning that name of the Iron Division, and not by any 
easy heroism. Every division in the British army took 
its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was duly 
blooded, at a cost of 25 per cent, and sometimes 
50 per cent, of their fighting strength. The Canadians 
took up the struggle at Courcelette and captured it in a 
fierce and bloody battle. The Australians worked up on 
the right of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny 
Thilloy. On the far left the fortress of Thiepval had fallen 
at last after repeated and frightful assaults, which I 



410 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

watched from ditches close enough to see our infantry — 
Wiltshires and Worcesters of the 25th Division — trudging 
through infernal fire. And then at last, after five months 
of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, mass-heroism, 
desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual 
human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were 
smashed, the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the 
enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of our attack, fell 
back in a far and wide retreat across a country which he 
laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from 
Bullecourt to St.-Quentin. 

XIX 

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we 
reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all 
our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, 
with not much difference in courage, not much difference 
in average of loss. By the end of that year's fighting our 
casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four 
hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with 
our dead. Our graveyards were growing forests of little 
white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. There 
were twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth below 
Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them 
were German. I could not walk without treading on 
them there. When I fell in the slime I clutched arms 
and legs. The stench of death was strong and awful. 

But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock 
kept their sanity through all this wilderness of slaughter, 
kept — oh, marvelous! — their spirit of humor, their faith 
in some kind of victory. I was with the Australians on 
that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they 
brought out trophies like men at a country fair. ... I 
remember an Australian colonel who came riding with a 
German beer-mug at his saddle. . . . Next day, though 
shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian 
boys set up some painted scenery which they had found 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 411 

among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the 
"Coo-ee Theater." 

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg hne, over 
a wide stretch of country which he laid waste behind him, 
making a desert of French villages and orchards and parks, 
so that even the fruit-trees were cut down, and the 
churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their 
lead. It was the enemy's first retreat on the western 
front, and that ferocious fighting of the British troops 
had smashed the strongest defenses ever built in war, 
and our raw recruits had broken the most famous regi- 
ments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and 
all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up 
their enemy with a sense of excitement because it see'med 
so much like victory and the end of war. 

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where 
so many boys of the 56th (London) Division had fallen 
on the 1st of July, I went through that evil place by way 
of Fonquevillers (which we called "Funky Villas"), and, 
stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches and 
dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and 
branchless trees, came into the open country to our out- 
post line. I met there a friendly sergeant who surprised 
me by referring in a casual way to a little old book of mine. 

"This place," he said, glancing at me, "is a strange 
Street of Adventure." 

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of 
mine when I was among a crowd of London lads who had 
just been engaged in a bloody fight at a place called The 
Hairpin. 

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft 
of a stinking barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was 
born. 

"I just wanted to ask you," he said, "whether Kath- 
arine married Frank?" 

The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me 
his own Street of Adventure. 

"I belong to Toc-emmas," he said (meaning trench- 



412" NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

mortars), "and my ojSicers would be very pleased if you 
would have a look at their latest stunt. We've got a 9.2 
mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the infantry. It's 
never been done before and we're going to blow old Fritz 
out of Kite Copse." 

I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and 
we fell in with a young officer also on his way to Pigeon 
Wood. He was in a merry mood, in spite of harassing 
fire round about and the occasional howl of a 5.9. He 
kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground 
and laughing at something that seemed to tickle his sense 
of humor. 

"See that.?" he said. "That's old Charlie Lowndes's 
work." 

At another pit in upheaved earth he said: "That's 
Charlie Lowndes again. . . . Old Charlie gave 'em hell. 
He's a topping chap. You must meet him. . . . My God! 
look at that!" 

He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an un- 
usually large crater. 

"Who is Charlie?" I asked. "Where can I find him?" 

"Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He's as 
pleased as Punch at having got beyond the infantry. 
First time it has ever been done. Took a bit of doing, 
too, with the largest size of Toc-emma." 

We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild 
chaos, and, guided by the officer and sergeant, I dived 
down into a deep dugout just captured from the Ger- 
mans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite Copse. 

"What cheer, Charlie!" shouted the young officer. 

"Hullo, fellow-my-lad ! . . . Come in. We're getting 
gloriously hinged on a rare find of German brandy." 

"Topping and I've brought a visitor." 

Capt. Charles Lowndes — "dear old Charlie" — received 
us most politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, 
with smoothly paneled walls fitted up with shelves, and 
good deal furniture made to match. 

"This is a nice little home in hell," said Charles. "At 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 413 

any moment, of course, we may be blown to bits, but 
meanwhile it is very comfy down here, and what makes 
everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an un- 
limited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to 
the gaiety of indecent minds there is a complete outfit of 
ladies* clothing in a neighboring dugout. Funny fellows 
those German officers. Take a pew, won't you? and 
have a drink. Orderly!" 

He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of 
German soda-water. 

We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own 
brandy and soda-water, out of his own mugs, sitting on 
his own chairs at his own table, and "dear old Charhe," 
who was a little etoile, as afterward I became, with a sense 
of deep satisfaction (the noise of shells seemed more re- 
mote), discoursed on war, which he hated, German psy- 
chology, trench-mortar barrages (they had simply blown 
the Boche out of Gommecourt), and his particular fancy 
stunt of stealing a march on the infantry, who, said Cap- 
tain Lowndes, are "laps behind." Other officers crowded 
into the dugout. One of them said: "You must come 
round to mine. It's a blasted palace," and I went round 
later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so 
often from shell-bursts that he thought the average of 
luck was up and he was bound to get *Mone in" before 
long. 

Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble gener- 
osity. There was much laughter among us, and after- 
ward we went upstairs and to the edge of the wood, to 
which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the 
trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, 
over the way. Late in the afternoon I took my leave of 
a merry company in that far-flung outpost of our line, and 
wished them luck. A few shells crashed through the 
wood as I left, but I was disdainful of them after that 
admirable brandy. It was a long walk back to "Funky 
Villas," not without the interest of arithmetical calcula- 
tions about the odds of luck in harassing fire, but a thou-^ 



414 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

sand yards or so from Pigeon Wood I looked back and 
saw that the enemy had begun to "take notice." Heavy 
shells were smashing through the trees there ferociously. 
I hoped my friends were safe in their dugouts again. . . . 
And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the 
young men, after five months of the greatest battles in 
the history of the world. It seemed to me wonderful. 

XX 

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, 
our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back 
day by day, the "Butchers' Shops," the agony in men's 
souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment 
of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of com- 
munication between fighting units and the command, the 
filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our 
battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human 
conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened on 
the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the 
tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked, 
German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, 
and documents which fell into the hands of our staff- 
officers. 

Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that 
they were beating their enemy back, in spite of their own 
bloody losses. The Germans had not even that source 
of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage 
fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the inefficiency of 
our staff- work, were not greater than the blunderings of 
the German High Command, and their problem was more 
difficult than ours because of the weakness of their re- 
serves, ov/ing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian 
front. The agony of their men was greater than ours. 

To understand the German situation it must be re- 
membered that from January to May, 1916, the German 
command on the western front was concentrating all its 
energy and available strength in man-power and gun- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 415 

power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince 
had staked his reputation upon that adventure, which he 
beheved would end in the capture of the strongest French 
fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He 
demanded men and more men, until every unit that 
could be spared from other fronts of the line had been 
thrown into that furnace. Divisions were called in from 
other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the 
western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty 
divisions. 

But the months passed and Verdun still held out above 
piles of German corpses on its slopes, and in June Ger- 
many looked east and saw a great menace. The Russian 
offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the 
Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help, "Send 
us more men," they said, and from the western front 
four divisions containing thirty-nine battalions were sent 
to them. 

They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another 
menace threatened the enemy, and it was ours. The 
British armies were getting ready to strike. In spite of 
Verdun, France still had men enough — withdrawn from 
that part of the line in which they had been relieved by 
the British — to co-operate in a new attack. 

It was our offensive that the German command feared 
most, for they had no exact knowledge of our strength or 
of the quality of our new troops. They knew that our 
army had grown prodigiously since the assault on Loos, 
nearly a year before. 

They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and 
the coming of the Australians, and the steady increase of 
recruiting in England, and month by month they had 
heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and had 
seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more 
terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration 
of batteries and divisions on the west and south of the 
Ancre. 

The German command expected a heavy blow and 



4i6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

prepared for it, but as yet had no knowledge of the driv- 
ing force behind it. What confidence they had of being 
able to resist the British attack was based upon the 
wonderful strength of the lines which they had been 
digging and fortifying since the autumn of the first year 
of war — ''impregnable positions," they had called them 
— ^the inexperience of our troops, their own immense quan- 
tity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gun- 
ners, and their profound behef in the superiority of Ger- 
man generalship. 

In order to prevent espionage during the coming 
struggle, and to conceal the movement of troops and 
guns, they ordered the civil populations to be removed 
from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons 
of military police across the country, picketed crossroads, 
and established a network of counter espionage to pre- 
vent any leakage of information. 

To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial 
fervor (not easily aroused to fever pitch after the bloody 
losses before Verdun) Orders of the Day were issued to 
the battalions counseling them to hold fast against the 
hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace 
(that was the gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht 
of Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), 
and promising them a speedy ending to the war. 

Great stores of material and munitions were concen- 
trated at rail-heads and dumps ready to be sent up to 
the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organiza- 
tion may well have seemed flawless — before the attack 
began. 

When they began they found that in "heavies" and in 
expenditure of high explosives they were outclassed. 

They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the 
British gunners, whom they had scorned as "amateurs," 
and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines 
with the utmost audacity, "spotting" for the guns, and 
registering on batteries, communication trenches, cross- 
roads, rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 417 

the German war-machine working opposite the British 
Hnes north and south of the Ancre. 

Even before the British infantry had left their trenches 
at dawn on July ist, German officers behind the firing- 
lines saw with anxiety that all the organization which 
had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary trench- 
warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under 
a deadly storm of shells. 

Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to 
front-line trenches without many casualties, and some- 
times could not be sent up at all. Telephone wires were 
cut, and communications broken between the front and 
headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were 
killed on the way to the Hnes. Troops moving forward 
from reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many 
men before arriving in the support trenches. 

Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this 
in personal safety, must have known before July ist that 
his resources in men and material would be strained to 
the uttermost by the British attack, but he could take a 
broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and 
taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no 
need to doubt that), the immense strength of their posi- 
tions, dug and tunneled beyond the power of high explo- 
sives, the number of his machine-guns, the concentration 
of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops, he 
could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite 
of a heavy price to pay there would be no break in his 
lines. 

At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have 
told, left their trenches and attacked on the right angle 
down from Gommecourt, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, 
Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt, 
below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German 
troops^ — Bavarians and Prussians — had been crouching 
in their dugouts, listening to the ceaseless crashing of the 
British "drum-fire." In places like Beaumont Hamel, 
the men down in the deep tunnels — some of them large 



4i8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

enough to hold a battalion and a half — were safe as long 
as they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. 
Trenches disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the 
men holding them — for some men had to stay on duty 
there — were blown to fragments. 

Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by 
heavy shells, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw 
them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Ma- 
metz and Montauban. The living men kept their cour- 
age, but belowground, under that tumult of bursting 
shells, and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home 
describing the horror of those hours. 

"We are quite shut off from the rest of the world," 
wrote one of them. "Nothing comes to us. No letters. 
The English keep such a barrage on our approaches it is 
terrible. To-morrow evening it will be seven days since 
this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much 
longer. Everything is shot to pieces." 

Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tun- 
neled shelters there was food enough, but the water could 
not be sent up. The German soldiers were maddened by 
thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled out and 
drank filthy water mixed with yellow shell-sulphur, and 
then were killed by high explosives. Other men crept 
out, careless of death, but compelled to drink. They 
crouched over the bodies of the men who lay above, or in, 
the shell-holes, and lapped up the puddles and then 
crawled down again if they were not hit. 

When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beau- 
mont Hamel and Thiepval they were received by waves 
of machine-gun bullets fired by men who, in spite of the 
ordeal of our seven days' bombardment, came out into 
the open now, at the moment of attack which they knew 
through their periscopes was coming. They brought 
their guns above the shell-craters of their destroyed 
trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran 
forward even into No Man's Land, and planted their 
machine-guns there, and swept down our men as they 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 419 

charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a 
frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men. 

On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, 
the British attack failed, as I have told, but southward 
the "impregnable" lines were smashed by a tide of British 
soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. 
Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Mon- 
tauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round 
Mametz village. 

For the German generals, receiving their reports with 
great difficulty because runners were killed and telephones 
broken, the question was: *'How will these British troops 
fight in the open after their first assault.'' How will our 
men stand between the first line and the second.?" 

As far as the German troops were concerned, there were 
no signs of cowardice, or "low morale" as we called it more 
kindly, in those early days of the struggle. They fought 
with a desperate courage, holding on to positions in rear- 
guard actions when our guns were slashing them and 
when our men were getting near to them, making us pay 
a heavy price for every little copse or gully or section of 
trench, and above all serving their machine-guns at La 
Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round Contalmaison, 
and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a wonder- 
ful obstinacy, until they were killed or captured. But 
fresh waves of British soldiers followed those who were 
checked or broken. 

After the first week of battle the German General Staff" 
had learned the truth about the qualities of those British 
"New Armies" which had been mocked and caricatured 
in German comic papers. They learned that these " ama- 
teur soldiers" had the qualities of the finest troops in the 
world — not only extreme valor, but skill and cunning, not 
only a great power of endurance under the heaviest fire, 
but a spirit of attack which was terrible in its eff"ect. 
They were fierce bayonet fighters. Once having gained 
a bit of earth or a ruined village, nothing would budge 
them unless they could be blasted out by gun-fire. Gen- 



420 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

eral Sixt von Arnim put down some candid notes in his 
report to Prince Rupprecht. 

"The EngHsh infantry shows great dash in attack, a 
factor to which immense confidence in its overwhelming 
artillery greatly contributes. ... It has shown great 
tenacity in defense. This was especially noticeable in 
the case of small parties, which, when once established 
with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or a group of 
houses, were very difficult to drive out." 

The German losses were piling up. The agony of the 
German troops under our shell-fire was reaching unnatu- 
ral Hmits of torture. The early prisoners I saw — Prus- 
sians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps — ^were 
nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in 
which their regiments had been cut to pieces. The Ger- 
man generals had to fill up the gaps, to put new barriers 
of men against the waves of British infantry. They flung 
new troops into the line, called up hurriedly from reserve 
depots. 

Now, for the first time, their stafF-work showed signs of 
disorder and demorahzation. When the Prussian Guards 
Reserves were brought up from Valenciennes to counter- 
attack at Contalmaison they were sent on to the battle- 
field without maps or local guides, and walked straight 
into our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces 
and many others suffered frightful things. Some of the 
prisoners told me that they had lost three-quarters of 
their number in casualties, and our troops advanced over 
heaps of killed and wounded. 

The I22d Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was 
among those which suffered horribly. Owing to our cease- 
less gun-fire, they could get no food-supplies and no water. 
The dugouts were crowded, so that they had to take turns 
to get into these shelters, and outside our shells were 
bursting over every yard of ground. 

"Those who went outside," a prisoner told me, "were 
killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown 
off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 421 

turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew 
that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most of 
those who came into the hole were wounded, some of 
them badly, so that we lay in blood." That is one little 
picture in a great panorama of bloodshed. 

The German command was not thinking much about 
the human suffering of its troops. It was thinking of the 
next defensive line upon which they would have to fall 
back if the pressure of the British offensive could be 
maintained — the Longueval-Bazentin-Pozieres line. It 
was getting nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts 
made in the Verdun offensive, the supplies of ammunition 
were not adequate to the enormous demand. 

The German gunners were trying to compete with the 
British in continuity of bombardments and the shells were 
running short. Guns were wearing out under this inces- 
sant strain, and it was difficult to replace them. General 
von Gallwitz received reports of "an alarmingly large 
number of bursts in the bore, particularly in field-guns," 

General von Arnim complained that "reserve supplies 
of ammunition were only available in very small quanti- 
ties." The German telephone system proved "totally 
inadequate in consequence of the development which the 
fighting took." The German air service was surprisingly 
weak, and the British airmen had established temporary 
mastery. 

"The numerical superiority of the enemy's airmen," 
noted General von Arnim, "and the fact that their 
machines were better made, became disagreeably apparent 
to us, particularly in their direction of the enemy's artil- 
lery fire and in bomb-dropping." 

On July 15th the British troops broke the German sec- 
ond line at Longueval and the Bazentins, and inflicted 
great losses upon the enemy, who fought with their usual 
courage until the British bayonets were among them. 

A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the 
remnants of the garrison — one hundred and fifty strong — • 

after a desperate and gallant resistance in ditches and 

28 



422 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

tunnels, where they had fought to the last, surrendered 
with honor. 

Then began the long battle of the woods — Devil's 
Wood, High Wood, Trones Wood — continued through 
August with most fierce and bloody fighting, which ended 
in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually but 
steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled 
those woods with shell-fire and the constant counter- 
attacks delivered by the Germans. 

"Counter-attack!" came the order from the German 
staff, and battalions of men marched out obediently to 
certain death, sometimes with incredible folly on the part 
of their commanding officers, who ordered these attacks 
to be made without the slightest chance of success. 

I saw an example of that at close range during a battle 
at Falfemont Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had ad- 
vanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them from a 
trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great 
pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young 
observing officer who had been detailed to report back to 
the guns. (Old "Falstaff," whose songs and stories had 
filled the tent under the Red Cross with laughter, toiled 
after us gallantly, but grunting and sweating under the 
sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our hurry.) 
Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called 
Leuze Wood, on rising ground, faced round among 
the thin, slashed trees of Falfemont, and advanced 
toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a solid bar. 
It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machine- 
guns into action, and the right side of the living bar 
frittered away, and then the whole Hne fell into the 
scorched grass. Another line followed. They were tall 
men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it 
seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to 
death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was 
exactly as though some invisible scythe had mown them 
down. 

In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting 






PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 423 

and captured by us from dead or living men there was one 
cry of agony and horror. 

**I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my 
life," wrote one of them. "They were those of the battle 
of the Somme. It began with a night attack on August 
13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening of the 
1 8th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of 
blood, 'It is all over with you.' A handful of half-mad, 
wretched creatures, worn out in body and mind, were all 
that was left of a whole battalion. We were that hand- 
ful." 

The losses of many of the German battalions were 
staggering (yet not greater than our own), and by the 
middle of August the morale of the troops was severely 
shaken. The 117th Division by Pozieres suffered very 
heavily. The nth Reserve and 157th Regiments each 
lost nearly three-quarters of their effectives. The 9th 
Reserve Corps had also lost heavily. The 9th Reserve 
Jager Battalion lost about three-quarters, the 84th Re- 
serve and 86th Reserve over half. On August loth the 
i6th Division had six battalions in reserve. 

By August 19th, owing to the large number of casual- 
ties, the greater part of those reserves had been absorbed 
into the front and support trenches, leaving as available 
reserves two exhausted battalions. 

The weakness of the division and the absolute necessity 
of reinforcing it led to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regi- 
ment (2d Guards Division) being brought up to strengthen 
the right flank in the Leipzig salient. This regiment had 
suffered casualties to the extent of over 50 per cent, 
west of Pozieres during the middle of July, and showed 
no eagerness to return to the fight. These are but a few 
examples of what was happening along the whole of the 
German front on the Somme. 

It became apparent by the end of August that the enemy 
was in trouble to find fresh troops to relieve his exhausted 
divisions, and that the wastage was faster than the arrival 
of new men. It was noticeable that he left divisions in 



424 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the line until incapable of further effort rather than re- 
lieving them earUer so that after resting they might again 
be brought on to the battlefield. The only conclusion 
to be drawn from this was that the enemy had not suffi- 
cient formations available to make the necessary reliefs. 

In July three of these exhausted divisions were sent to 
the east, their place being taken by two new divisions, 
and in August three more exhausted divisions were sent 
to Russia, eight new divisions coming to the Somme 
front. The British and French offensive was drawing 
in all the German reserves and draining them of their 
life's blood. 

"We entrained at Savigny," wrote a man of one of 
these regiments, "and at once knew our destination. It 
was our old blood-bath — the Somme." 

In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme 
was called the "Bath of Blood" by the German troops 
who waded across its shell-craters and in the ditches 
which were heaped with their dead. But what I have 
described is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath 
was to be filled deeper in the months that followed. 

XXI 

The name (that "blood-bath") and the news of battle 
could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who 
had already been chilled with horror by the losses at 
Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments quar- 
tered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, 
St.-Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as 
Brussels, waiting to go to the front, nor from the civil 
population of those towns, held for two years by their 
enemy — these blond young men who lived in their houses, 
marched down their streets, and made love to their 
women. 

The news was brought down from the Somme front by 
Red Cross trains, arriving in endless succession, and 
packed with maimed and mangled men. German mili- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 425 

tary policemen formed cordons round the railway sta- 
tions, pushed back civilians who came to stare with som- 
ber eyes at these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but 
when the ambulances rumbled through the streets toward 
the hospitals — long processions of them, with the soles of 
men's boots turned up over the stretchers on which they 
lay quiet and stiff — the tale was told, though no word was 
spoken. 

The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increas- 
ing anxiety, was told clearly enough — as I read in capt- 
ured letters — by the faces of German officers who went 
about in these towns behind the lines with gloomy looks, 
and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irri- 
table and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for 
all this cursing and bullying. A certain battahon com- 
mander had a nervous breakdown because he had to meet 
his colonel in the morning. 

"He is dying with fear and anxiety," wrote one of his 
comrades. 

Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more 
afraid of their superior officers, upon whom this bad news 
from the Somme had an evil eff"ect. 

The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the 
line and sent back to rest. The men reported that their 
battalions had been cut to pieces. Some of their regi- 
ments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They 
described the frightful eff'ect of the British artillery — the 
smashed trenches, the shell-crater, the horror. 

It was not good for the morale of men who were just 
going up there to take their turn. 

The man who was afraid of his colonel ''sits all day 
long writing home, with the picture of his wife and chil- 
dren before his eyes." He was afraid of other things. 

Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused 
them (unjustly) of shirking the Somme battlefields and 
leaving the Bavarians to go to the blood-bath. 

"All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme 
(this much is certain, you can see no Prussians there). 



426 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

and this in spite of the losses the ist Bavarian Corps 
suffered recently at Verdun! And how we did suffer! 
... It appears that we are in for another turn — at least 
the 5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking 
about it for a long time. To the devil with it! Every 
Bavarian regiment is being sent into it, and it's a 
swindle." 

It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the 
Somme battlefields. Those battalions of gray-clad men 
entrained without any of the old enthusiasm with which 
they had gone to earlier battles. Their gloom was 
noticed by the officers. 

"Sing, you sheeps' heads, sing!" they shouted. 

They were compelled to sing, by order. 

"In the afternoon," wrote a man of the i8th Reserve 
Division, "we had to go out again; we were to learn to 
sing. The greater part did not join in, and the song 
went feebly. Then we had to march round in a circle 
and sing, and that went no better. After that we had 
an hour off, and on the way back to billets we were to 
sing 'Deutschland iiber Alles,' but this broke down com- 
pletely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any 
more." 

They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through 
the streets of French and Belgian towns to be entrained 
for the Somme front, for they had forebodings of the fate 
before them. Yet none of their forebodings were equal 
in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which 
they were flung. 

The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, 
was a way of terror, ugHness, and death. Not all the 
imagination of morbid minds searching obscenely for foul- 
ness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony 
could surpass these scenes along the way to the German 
lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, 
and Lesboeufs. 

Many times, long before a German battalion had 
arrived near the trenches, it was but a collection of nerve- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 427^ 

broken men bemoaning losses already suffered far behind 
the lines and filled with hideous apprehension. For 
British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into 
distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to 
rail-heads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen 
were on bombing flights over railway stations and rest- 
billets and highroads down which the German troops 
came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley be- 
tween Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, 
and many other places on the lines of route. 

German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by 
train found themselves under the fire of a single airplane 
which flew very low and dropped bombs. They exploded 
with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the first carriage 
behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A 
second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a 
clatter of broken glass, the rending of wood, and the fall 
of bricks. All lights went out, and the German soldiers 
groped about in the darkness amid the splinters of glass 
and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the 
sound of their groans. It was but one scene along the 
way to that blood-bath through which they had to wade 
to the trenches of the Somme. 

FHghts of British airplanes circled over the villages on 
the way. At Grevilliers, in August, eleven 1 12-16 bombs 
fell in the market square, so that the center of the village 
collapsed in a state of ruin, burying soldiers billeted there. 
Every day the British airmen paid these visits, meeting 
the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, 
and swooping over them like a flying death. Even on 
the march in open country the German soldiers tramping 
silently along — not singing in spite of orders — were 
bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew 
down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bul- 
lets. The Germans lost their nerve at such times, and 
scattered into the ditches, falHng over one another, struck 
and cursed by their Unteroffizieren, and leaving their dead 
and wounded in the roadway. 



428 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were 
choked with the traffic of war, with artillery and trans- 
port wagons and horse ambulances, and always thousands 
of gray men marching up to the lines, or back from them, 
exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of hell 
up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, 
directing all the traffic with the usual swearing and curs- 
ing, and rode alongside the transport wagons and the 
troops, urging them forward at a quicker pace because 
of stern orders received from headquarters demanding 
quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were des- 
perately wanted up in the lines. The English were 
attacking again. . . . God alone knew what was happening. 
Regiments had lost their way. Wounded were pouring 
back. Officers had gone mad. Into the midst of all th^s 
turmoil shells fell — shells from long-range guns. Trans- 
port wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and frag- 
ments of artillery horses lay all over the roads. Men lay 
dead or bleeding under the debris of gun-wheels and 
broken bricks. Above all the noise of this confusion and 
death in the night the hard, stern voices of German officers 
rang out, and German discipline prevailed, and men 
marched on to greater perils. 

They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regi- 
ment on the march was tracked all along the way by 
British gun-fire directed from airplanes and captive bal- 
loons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who 
had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contal- 
maison. 

At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of 
twelve-inch shells. Nearer to the line they came under 
the fire of eight-inch and six-inch shells. Four-point- 
sevens (4.7's) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At 
Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the 
officer was taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were 
few men left. 

It was so with the 3d Jager Battalion, ordered up hur- 
riedly to make a counter-attack near Flers. They suf- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 429 

fered so heavily on the way to the trenches that no attack 
could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the work 
to do. 

The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every 
kilometer was passed, until the stench of corruption was 
wafted on the wind, so that men were sickened, and tried 
not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on the lee 
side of its foulness. They walked now through places 
which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins 
where death lay in wait for German soldiers. 

"It seems queer to me," wrote one of them, "that 
whole villages close to the front look as flattened as a 
child's toy run over by a steam-roller. Not one stone 
remains on another. The streets are one line of shell- 
holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will 
see with what feelings we come into the line — into trenches 
where for months shells of all cahber have rained. . . . 
Flers is a scrap heap." 

Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. 
The reliefs could only be made at night lest they should 
be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, 
and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the 
guidance was but little good when many trenches had 
been smashed in and only shell-craters could be found. 

"In the front line of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, 
"the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there 
was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the 
trench — almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite 
insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench 
or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the 
earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie 
quite uncovered in a trench recess, and no one seems to 
trouble about them. One sees horrible pictures — here 
an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the earth. 
And these are all German soldiers — heroes! 

"Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine 
men were buried, of whom three were dead. All along 
the trench men kept on getting buried. What had been 



430 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

a perfect trench a few hours before was In parts com- 
pletely blown in. . . . The men are getting weaker. It is 
impossible to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer 
be reckoned accurately. Without a doubt many of our 
people are killed." 

That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome 
pictures, true as the death they described, true to the 
pictures on our side of the line as on their side, which went 
back to German homes during the battles of the Somme. 
Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men 
sitting in wet ditches, in "fox-holes," as they called their 
dugouts, "up to my waist in mud," as one of them de- 
scribed, scribbled pitiful things which they hoped might 
reach their people at home, as a voice from the dead. 
For they had had little hope of escape from the blood- 
bath. "When you get this I shall be a corpse," wrote 
one of them, and one finds the same foreboding in many 
of these documents. 

Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the 
incessant bombardment by English guns began to lose 
their nerves after a day or two. They were always in 
fear of British infantry sweeping upon them suddenly 
behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with 
bombs and bayonets. Sentries became "jumpy," and 
signaled attacks when there were no attacks. The gas- 
alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a bell in 
the trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and 
sat in them until they were nearly stifled. 

Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near 
the British lines, written by a man now dead: 

"The telephone bell rings. 'Are you there? Yes, 
here's Nau's battahon.* ^Good. That is all.' Then that 
ceases, and now the wire is in again perhaps for the 
twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is inter- 
rupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after 
the other, each more terrifying than the other, of enor- 
mous losses through the bombs and shells of the enemy, 
of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all possible 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 431 

possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we are 
tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our 
nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can 
forget the horrors of the night." 

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and 
filthy. 

"Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to 
try and bail out the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay 

down in the water with G . We were to have worked 

on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a 
few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was 
frozen in every limb, poured the water out of my boots, 
and lay down again." 

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not 
write about them. 

The German generals and their staff's could not be quite 
indiff"erent to all this welter of human suffering among their 
troops, in spite of the cold, scientific spirit with which 
they regarded the problem of war. The agony of the 
individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no 
war without agony. But the psychology of masses of 
men had to be considered, because it aff"ects the efficiency 
of the machine. 

The German General Staff* on the western front was 
becoming seriously alarmed by the declining morale of 
its infantry under the increasing strain of the British 
attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But it 
could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who 
were lying on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who 
were being carried back to the dressing stations, nor to 
bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the French 
and British troops. 

Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiep- 
val, and the German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in 
November, the enemy's command was already filled with 
a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting 
strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for in- 
creasing the number of its divisions. It was forced to 



432 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

withdraw troops badly needed on other fronts, and the 
successive shocks of the British offensive reached as far 
as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting 
system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn out of 
the German ranks, 

XXII 

All through July and August the enemy's troops fought 
with wonderful and stubborn courage, defending every 
bit of broken woodland, every heap of bricks that was 
once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy 
shell-fire, with obstinacy. 

It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those 
battles of the Somme our men fought against an enemy 
hard to beat, grim and resolute, and inspired sometimes 
with the courage of despair, which was hardly less dan- 
gerous than the courage of hope. 

The Australians who struggled to get the high ground 
at Pozieres did not have an easy task. The enemy made 
many counter-attacks against them. All the ground 
thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that the earth 
became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody 
fighting at close quarters which did not last a day or two, 
but many weeks. Mouquet Farm was like the phenix 
which rose again out of its ashes. In its tunneled ways 
German soldiers hid and came out to fight our men in 
the rear long after the site of the farm was in our hands. 

But the German troops were fighting what they knew 
to be a losing battle. They were fighting rear-guard 
actions, trying to gain time for the hasty digging of 
ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives at the 
highest price. 

They lived not only under incessant gun-fire, gradually 
weakening their nerve-power, working a physical as well 
as a moral change in them, but in constant terror of 
British attacks. 

They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day 
or night, even in their deepest dugouts. The British varied 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 433 

their times of attack. At dawn, at noon, when the sun 
was reddening in the west, just before the dusk, in pitch 
darkness, even, the steady, regular bombardment that 
had never ceased all through the days and nights would 
concentrate into the great tumult of sudden drum-fire, 
and presently waves of men — English or Scottish or Irish, 
Australians or Canadians — ^would be sweeping on to them 
and over them, rummaging down into the dugouts with 
bombs and bayonets, gathering up prisoners, quick to 
kill if men were not quick to surrender. 

In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison 
there — the i8oth Regiment, who had held it for two 
years — knew that they were doomed. In this way Guille- 
mont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first place hardly a 
man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of 
horror in German lines, and in the second place there 
was no long fight against the Irish, who stormed it in a 
wild, fierce rush which even machine-guns could not 
check. 

The German General Staff was getting flurried, grab- 
bing at battalions from other parts of the line, disorganiz- 
ing its divisions under the urgent need of flinging in men 
to stop this rot in the lines, ordering counter-attacks 
which were without any chance of success, so that thin 
waves of men came out into the open, as I saw them 
several times, to be swept down by scythes of bullets 
which cut them clean to the earth. Before September 
15th they hoped that the British offensive was wearing 
itself out. It seemed to them at least doubtful that after 
the struggle of two and a half months the British troops 
could still have spirit and strength enough to fling them- 
selves against new lines. 

But the machinery of their defense was crumbling. 
Many of their guns had worn out, and could not be re- 
placed quickly enough. Many batteries had been knocked 
out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin and 
Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grand- 
court and a new line of safety. Battalion commanders 



434 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

clamored for greater supplies of hand-grenades, intrench- 
ing-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets, and all kinds of 
fighting material enormously in excess of all previous 
requirements. 

The dijSiculties of dealing with the wounded, who lit- 
tered the battlefields and choked the roads with the 
traffic of ambulances, became increasingly severe, owing 
to the dearth of horses for transport and the longer range 
of British guns which had been brought far forward. 

The German General Staff studied its next lines of de- 
fense away through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesbceufs, 
Morval, and Combles, and they did not look too good, 
but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and 
the exhaustion — surely those fellows were exhausted! — 
of British troops — good enough. 

On September 15th the German command had another 
shock when the whole line of the British troops on the 
Somme front south of the Ancre rose out of their trenches 
and swept over the German defenses in a tide. 

Those defenses broke hopelessly, and the waves dashed 
through. Here and there, as on the German left at 
Morval and Lesbceufs, the bulwarks stood for a time, but 
the British pressed against them and round them. On 
the German right, below the little river of the Ancre, 
Courcelette fell, and Martinpuich, and at last, as I have 
written, High Wood, which the Germans desired to hold 
at all costs, and had held against incessant attacks by 
great concentration of artillery, was captured and left 
behind by the London men. A new engine of war had 
come as a demoralizing influence among German troops, 
spreading terror among them on the first day out of the 
tanks. For the first time the Germans were outwitted 
in inventions of destruction; they who had been foremost 
in all engines of death. It was the moment of real panic 
in the German lines — a panic reaching back from the 
troops to the High Command. 

Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British 
made a new advance — all this time the French were press- 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 435 

ing forward, too, on our right by Roye — Combles was 
evacuated without a fight and with a Utter of dead in its 
streets; Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost 
by the Germans; and a day later Thiepval, the greatest 
fortress position next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all 
its garrison taken prisoners. 

They were black days in the German headquarters, 
where staff-oiicers heard the news over their telephones 
and sent stern orders to artillery commanders and divi- 
sional generals, and after dictating new instructions that 
certain trench systems must be held at whatever price, 
heard that already they were lost. 

It was at this time that the morale of the German 
troops on the Somme front showed most signs of breaking. 
In spite of all their courage, the ordeal had been too hid- 
eous for them, and in spite of all their discipline, the iron 
discipline of the German soldier, they were on the edge of 
revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break 
in the morale of the enemy's troops during this period 
reveal a pitiful picture of human agony. 

**We are now fighting on the Somme with the English," 
wrote a man of the 17th Bavarian Regiment. *'You can 
no longer call it war. It is mere murder. We are at the 
focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux Wood (near 
Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war — 
the slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at 
Hulluch — ^are the purest child's play compared with this 
massacre, and that is much too mild a description. I 
hardly think they will bring us into the fight again, for we 
are in a very bad way." 

"From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme," 
wrote a man of the loth Bavarians, "and my regiment 
had fifteen hundred casualties." 

A detailed picture of the German losses under our bom- 
bardment was given in the diary of an ojSicer captured in 
a trench near Flers, and dated September 22d. 

"The four days ending September 4th, spent in the 
trenches, were characterized by a continual enemy bom- 



436 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

bardment that did not abate for a single instant. The 
enemy had registered on our trenches with Hght, as well 
as medium and heavy, batteries, notwithstanding that he 
had no direct observation from his trenches, which lie 
on the other side of the summit. His registering was done 
by his excellent air service, which renders perfect reports 
of everything observed. 

"During the first day, for instance, whenever the 
slightest movement was visible in our trenches during 
the presence, as is usually the case, of enemy aircraft 
flying as low as three and four hundred yards, a heavy 
bombardment of the particular section took place. The 
very heavy losses during the first day brought about the 
resolution to evacuate the trenches during the daytime. 
Only a small garrison was left, the remainder withdraw- 
ing to a part of the line on the left of the Martinpuich- 
Pozieres road. 

"The signal for a bombardment by *heavies* was given 
by the English airplanes. On the first day we tried to 
fire by platoons on the airplanes, but a second airplane 
retahated by dropping bombs and firing his machine-gun 
at our troops. Our own airmen appeared only once for 
a short time behind our lines. 

"While many airplanes are observing from early morn- 
ing till late at night, our own hardly ever venture near. 
The opinion is that our trenches cannot protect troops 
during a barrage of the shortest duration, owing to lack 
of dugouts. 

"The enemy understands how to prevent, with his 
terrible barrage, the bringing up of building material, and 
even how to hinder the work itself. The consequence is 
that our trenches are always ready for an assault on his 
part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a heavy 
barrage on the enemy trenches at a great expense of am- 
munition, cannot cause similar destruction to him. He 
can bring his building material up, can repair his trenches 
as well as build new ones, can bring up rations and am- 
munition, and remove the wounded. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 437 

"The continual barrage on our lines of communication 
makes it very difficult for us to ration and relieve our 
troops, to supply water, ammunition, and building mate- 
rial, to evacuate wounded, and causes heavy losses. This 
and the lack of protection from artillery fire and the 
weather, the lack of hot meals, the continual necessity of 
lying still in the same place, the danger of being buried, 
the long time the wounded have to remain in the trenches, 
and chiefly the terrible effect of the machine- and heavy- 
artillery fire, controlled by an excellent air service, has a 
most demoralizing effect on the troops. 

"Only with the greatest difficulty could the men be 
persuaded to stay in the trenches under those conditions." 

There were some who could not be persuaded to stay 
if they could see any chance of deserting or malingering. 
For the first time on our front the German officers could 
not trust the courage of their men, nor their loyalty, nor 
their sense of discipline. All this horror of men blown to 
bits over living men, of trenches heaped with dead and 
dying, was stronger than courage, stronger than loyalty, 
stronger than discipline. A moral rot was threatening to 
bring the German troops on the Somme front to disaster. 

Large numbers of men reported sick and tried by every 
kind of trick to be sent back to base hospitals. 

In the 4th Bavarian Division desertions were frequent, 
and several times whole bodies of men refused to go for- 
ward into the front line. The morale of men in the 393d 
Regiment, taken at Courcelette, seemed to be very weak. 
One of the prisoners declared that they gave themselves 
up without firing a shot, because they could trust the 
English not to kill them. 

The platoon commander had gone away, and the pris- 
oner was ordered to alarm the platoon in case of attack, 
but did not do so on purpose. They did not shoot with 
rifles or machine-guns and did not throw bombs. 

Many of the German officers were as demoralized as 
the men, shirking their posts in the trenches, shamming 
sickness, and even leading the way to surrender. Prison- 



438 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

ers of the 351st Regiment, which lost thirteen hundred 
men in fifteen days, told of officers who had refused to 
take their men up to the front-line, and of whole com- 
panies who had declined to move when ordered to do so. 
An officer of the 74th Landwehr Regiment is said by 
prisoners to have told his men during our preliminary 
bombardment to surrender as soon as we attacked. 

A German regimental order says : " I must state with the 
greatest regret that the regiment, during this change of 
position, had to take notice of the sad fact that men of 
four of the companies, inspired by shameful cowardice, 
left their companies on their own initiative and did not 
move into line." 

Another order contains the same fact, and a warning 
of what punishment may be meted out: 

"Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position 
without permission and hiding at the rear. It is our duty 
. . . each at his post — to deal with this fact with energy 
and success." 

Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not 
accompany them into the trenches, but went down to 
the hospitals with imaginary diseases. In any case there 
was a great deal of real sickness, mental and physical. 
The ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever, 
pleurisy, jaundice, and stomach complaints of all kinds, 
twisted up with rheumatism after lying in waterlogged 
holes, lamed for life by bad cases of trench-foot, and 
nerve-broken so that they could do nothing but weep. 

The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest 
number. Many men went raving mad. The shell-shock 
victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly, or lay motion- 
less like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every 
limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with a great terror. 

To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the 
Somme battlefields were not only shambles, but a terri- 
tory which the devil claimed as his own for the torture of 
men's brains and souls before they died in the furnace 
fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 439 

minds of men who retained their sanity — a revolt against 
the people who had ordained this vast outrage against 
God and humanity. 

Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words 
against "the millionaires — who grow rich out of the war," 
against the high people who live in comfort behind the 
lines. Letters from home inflamed these thoughts. 

It was not good reading for men under shell-fire. 

*'It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay- 
at-homes can treat us as female criminals. Tell me, dear 
husband, are you a criminal when you fight in the 
trenches, or why do people treat women and children 
here as such.? . . . 

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the 
gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything 
in front of our very eyes. . . . All soldiers — friend and foe — 
ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, so 
that this war which enslaves the people more than ever 
may cease." 

Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching 
the German soldiers on the Somme, and they did not 
strengthen the morale of men already victims of terror 
and despair. 

•Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To 
those in front came Orders of the Day warning them, ex- 
horting them, commanding them to hold fast. 

"To the hesitating and faint-hearted in the regiment," 
says one of these Orders, "I would say the following: 

"What the Englishman can do the German can do also. 
Or if, on the other hand, the Enghshman really is a better 
and superior being, he would be quite justified in his aim 
as regards this war, viz., the extermination of the German. 
There is a further point to be noted: this is the first time 
we have been in the line on the Somme, and what is more, 
we are there at a time when things are more calm. The 
English regiments opposing us have been in the firing-line 
for the second, and in some cases even the third, time. 
Heads up and play the man!" 



440 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

It was easy to write such documents. It was more 
difficult to bring up reserves of men and ammunition. 
The German command was harder pressed by the end of 
September. 

From July ist to September 8th, according to trust- 
worthy information, fifty-three German divisions in all 
were engaged against the Allies on the Somme battle- 
front. Out of these fourteen were still in the line on 
September 8th. 

Twenty-eight had been withdrawn, broken and ex- 
hausted, to quieter areas. Eleven more had been with- 
drawn to rest-billets. Under the Allies' artillery fire and 
infantry attacks the average life of a German division as 
a unit fit for service on the Somme was nineteen days. 
More than two new German divisions had to be brought 
into the front-line every week since the end of June, to 
replace those smashed in the process of resisting the 
Allied attack. In November it was reckoned by com- 
petent observers in the field that well over one hundred 
and twenty German divisions had been passed through 
the ordeal of the Somme, this number including those 
which have appeared there more than once. 

XXIII 

By September 25th, when the British troops made 
another attack, the morale of the German troops was 
reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right, at Beau- 
mont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the 
great system of protective dugouts which had given them 
a sense of safety before July ist. Their second and third 
lines of defense had been carried, and they were existing 
in shell-craters and trenches hastily scraped up under 
ceaseless artillery fire. 

The horrors of the battlefield were piled up to heights 
of agony and terror. Living men dwelt among the un- 
buried dead, made their way to the front-lines over heaps 
of corpses, breathed in the smell of human corruption. 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 441 

and had always In their ears the cries of the wounded they 
could not rescue. They wrote these things in tragic 
letters — thousands of them — ^which never reached their 
homes in Germany, but lay in their captured ditches. 

"The number of dead lying about is awful. One 
stumbles over them." 

"The stench of the dead lying round us is un- 
bearable." 

"We are no longer men here. We are worse than 
beasts." 

"It is hell let loose." . . . "It is horrible." . . . "We've 
lived in misery." 

"If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps 
there would be a change. But they are never told." 

"The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad." 

Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets 
to the real truth of war — the "glory" and the "splendor" 
of it preached by the German philosophers and British 
Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic 
for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. 
Every line these German soldiers wrote might have 
been written by one of ours; from both sides of the 
shifting lines there was the same death and the same 
hell. 

Behind the lines the German General StafF, counting 
up the losses of battalions and divisions who staggered out 
weakly, performed juggling tricks with what reserves it 
could lay its hands on, and flung up stray units to re- 
lieve the poor wretches in the trenches. Many of those 
reliefs lost their way in going up, and came up late, 
already shattered by the shell-fire through which they 
passed. 

"Our position," wrote a German infantry officer, "was, 
of course, quite different from what we had been told. 
Our company alone reHeved a whole battalion. We had 
been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men 
weakened by casualties. 

"The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy 



442 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

was, how far off he was, or whether any of our own 
troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our 
support position until six o'clock this evening. The 
EngHsh are four hundred yards away, by the windmill 
over the hill." 

One German soldier wrote that the British "seem to 
relieve their infantry very quickly, while the German 
commands work on the principle of relieving only in the 
direst need, and leaving the divisions in as long as 
possible." 

Another wrote that: 

"The leadership of the divisions really fell through. 
For the most part we did not get orders, and the regiment 
had to manage as best it could. If orders arrived they 
generally came too late or were dealt out 'from the green 
table' without knowledge of the conditions in front, so 
that to carry them out was impossible." 

All this was a sign of demoralization, not only among the 
troops who were doing the fighting and the suffering, but 
among the organizing generals behind, who were direct- 
ing the operations. The continual hammer-strokes of 
the British and French armies on the Somme battlefields 
strained the German war-machine on the western front 
almost to breaking-point. 

It seemed as though a real debacle might happen, and 
that they would be forced to effect a general retreat — a 
withdrawal more or less at ease or a retirement under 
pressure from the enemy. . . . 

But they had luck — astonishing luck. At the very 
time when the morale of the German soldiers was lowest 
and when the strain on the High Command was greatest 
the weather turned in their favor and gave them just 
the breathing-space they desperately needed. Rain fell 
heavily in the middle of October, autumn mists prevented 
airplane activity and artillery-work, and the ground be- 
came a quagmire, so that the British troops found it diffi- 
cult to get up their supplies for a new advance. 

The Germans were able in this respite to bring up new 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 443 

divisions, fresh and strong enough to make heavy counter- 
attacks in the Stuff and Schwaben and Regina trenches, 
and to hold the Hnes more securely for a time, while great 
digging was done farther back at Bapaume and the next 
line of defense. Successive weeks of bad weather and our 
own tragic losses checked the impetus of the British and 
French driving power, and the Germans were able to 
reorganize and reform. 

As I have said, the shock of our offensive reached as 
far as Germany, and caused a complete reorganization 
in the system of obtaining reserves of man-power. The 
process of "combing out," as we call it, was pursued with 
astounding ruthlessness, and German mothers, already 
stricken with the loss of their elder sons, raised cries of 
despair when the youngest born were also seized — boys of 
eighteen belonging to the 191 8 class. 

The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in 
March and May of this year, receiving a three months' 
training before being transferred to the field-recruit de- 
pots in June and July. About the middle of July the first 
large drafts joined their units and made their appearance 
at the front, and soon after the beginning of our offensive 
at least half this class was in the front-line regiments. 
The massacre of the boys had begun. 

Then older men, men beyond middle age, who corre- 
spond to the French Territorial class, exempted from 
fighting service and kept on lines of communication, were 
also called to the front, and whole garrisons of these gray 
heads were removed from German towns to fill up the 
ranks. 

"The view is held here," wrote a German soldier of the 
Somme, "that the Higher Command intends gradually 
to have more and more Landsturm battalions (men of 
the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for a few 
weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the 
men, and thus to secure by degrees a body of troops on 
which it can count in an emergency." 

In the month of November the German High Com- 



444 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

mand believed that the British attacks were definitely at 
an end, "having broken down," as they claimed, "in 
mud and blood," but another shock came to them when 
once more British troops — the 51st Highland Division 
and the 63 d Naval Division — left their trenches, in fog 
and snow, and captured the strongest fortress position 
on the enemy's front, at Beaumont Hamel, bringing back 
over six thousand prisoners. It was after that they began 
their retreat. 

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides 
of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible 
to read as they were to write. But they are less than the 
actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hun- 
dreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the 
broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell- 
shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and 
the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civ- 
ilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though 
they led to what we called "Victory." More died there 
than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The 
Old Order of the world died there, because many men 
who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and 
vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led 
up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who 
prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and 
had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted 
and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and 
their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the mili- 
tarism which had plunged him into that horror. The 
British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of 
all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines 
and saw an evil there which was also his enemy — the evil 
of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of 
humble men so that war might be sprung upon them 
without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers 
who hated German militarism not because of its wicked- 
ness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of 
a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to 



PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME 445 

regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the 
right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch- 
word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme 
battles there were many other battles as bloody and 
terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men 
in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its 
*' make-up" and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service 
to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument 
for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed 
by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity 
must be abandoned for a new creed which would give 
better results between men and nations. There could be 
no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with 
the words "Love one another." Or if bayonet-drill and 
high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in prepara- 
tion for another struggle such as this, then at least let 
men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law 
of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient 
to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chap- 
lains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for 
gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spirit- 
ual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of 
many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument 
by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blun- 
derbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, 
when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the 
break of its machine or by the revolt of its people — ^not 
until then — there must be a new order of things, which 
would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of 
fife, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of 
many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and 
reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common 
sense based on common interests, and inspired by an 
ideal higher than this beastHke rivalry of nations. So 
thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier- 
poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many on- 
lookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless 
he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like 



446 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

that after the war — as many of them are now talking — 
and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against 
the evil that had produced this devil's trap of war, and 
the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in 
their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles 
of the Somme. 



Part Seven 



THE FIELDS OF 
ARMAGEDDON 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 



DURING the two years that followed the battles of 
the Somme I recorded in my daily despatches, re- 
published in book form {The Struggle in Flanders and The 
Way to Victory)^ the narrative of that continuous conflict 
in which the British forces on the western front were at 
death-grips with the German monster where now one side 
and then the other heaved themselves upon their adver- 
sary and struggled for the knock-out blow, until at last, 
after staggering losses on both sides, the enemy was 
broken to bits in the last combined attack by British, 
Belgian, French, and American armies. There is no need 
for me to retell all that history in detail, and I am glad 
to know that there is nothing I need alter in the record of 
events which I wrote as they happened, because they 
have not been falsified by any new evidence; and those 
detailed descriptions of mine stand true in fact and in the 
emotion of the hours that passed, while masses of men 
were slaughtered in the fields of Armageddon. 

But now, looking back upon those last two years of the 
war as an eye-witness of many tragic and heroic things, 
I see the frightful drama of them as a whole and as one 
act was related to another, and as the plot which seemed 
so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not 
under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, 
to the cHmax in which empires crashed and exhausted 
nations looked round upon the ruin which followed defeat 
and victory. I see also, as in one picture, the colossal 
scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon of our 
civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each 



450 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

day's success or failure, each day's slaughter on that side 
or the other. One may add up the whole suim according 
to the bookkeeping of Fate, by double-entry, credit and 
debits profit and loss. One may set our attacks in the 
battles of Flanders against the strength of the German 
defense, and say our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff 
reckons them, and as many of us guessed) were in our 
favor, because we could afford the difference of exchange 
and the enemy could not put so many human counters 
into the pool for the final "kitty" in this gamble with 
life and death. One may balance the German offensive 
in March of 'i8 with the weight that was piling up against 
them by the entry of the Americans. One may also see 
now, very clearly, the paramount importance of the 
human factor in this arithmetic of war, the morale of 
men being of greater influence than generalship, though 
dependent on it, the spirit of peoples being as vital to 
success as the mechanical efficiency of the war-machine; 
and above all, one is now able to observe how each side 
blundered on in a blind, desperate way, sacrificing masses 
of human life without a clear vision of the consequences, 
until at last one side blundered more than another and 
was lost. It will be impossible to pretend in history that 
our High Command, or any other, foresaw the thread of 
plot as it was unraveled to the end, and so arranged its 
plan that events happened according to design. The 
events of March, 191 8, were not foreseen nor prevented 
by French or British. The ability of our generals was 
not imaginative nor inventive, but limited to the piling 
up of men and munitions, always more men and more 
munitions, against positions of enormous strength and 
overcoming obstacles by sheer weight of flesh and blood 
and high explosives. They were not cunning so far as 
I could see, nor in the judgment of the men under their 
command, but simple and straightforward gentlemen 
who said "once more unto the breach," and sent up new 
battering-rams by brigades and divisions. There was 
no evidence that I could find of high directing brains 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 451 

choosing the weakest spot in the enemy's armor and 
piercing it with a sharp sword, or avoiding a direct assault 
against the enemy's most formidable positions and leap- 
ing upon him from some unguarded way. Perhaps that 
was impossible in the conditions of modern warfare and 
the limitations of the British front until the arrival of 
the tanks, which, for a long time, were wasted in the im- 
passable bogs of Flanders, where their steel skeletons still 
lie rusting as a proof of heroic efforts vainly used. Pos- 
sible or not, and rare genius alone could prove it one way 
or another, it appeared to the onlooker, as Well as to the 
soldier who carried out commands that our method of 
warfare was to search the map for a place which was 
strongest in the enemy's lines, most difficult to attack, 
most powerfully defended, and then after due advertise- 
ment, not to take an unfair advantage of the enemy, to 
launch the assault. That had always been the English 
way and that was our way in many battles of the great 
war, which were won (unless they were lost) by the sheer 
valor of men who at great cost smashed their way through 
all obstructions. 

The Germans, on the whole, showed more original 
genius in military science, varying their methods of 
attack and defense according to circumstances, building 
trenches and dugouts which we never equaled; inventing 
the concrete blockhouse or "pill-box" for a forward de- 
fensive zone thinly held in advance of the main battle 
zone, in order to lessen their slaughter under the weight 
of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for a time); scattering 
their men in organized shell-craters in order to distract 
our barrage fire; using the "elastic system of defense" 
with frightful success against Nivelle's attack in the 
Champagne; creating the system of assault of "infiltra- 
tion" which broke the Itahan lines at Caporetto in 19 17 
and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we 
may set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to 
victory, but the German High Command blundered atro- 
ciously in all the larger calculations of war, so that they 



452 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

brought about the doom of their empire by a series of 
acts which would seem dehberate if we had not known 
that they were merely bHnd. With a folly that still 
seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the greatest 
power in the world — in numbers of men and in potential 
energy — to their list of enemies at a time when their own 
man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance 
they flouted the United States and forced her to declare 
war. Their temptation, of course, was great. The Brit- 
ish naval blockade was causing severe suffering by food 
shortage to the German people and denying them access 
to raw material which they needed for the machinery of 
war. 

The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would 
and did inflict immense damage upon British and Allied 
shipping, and was a deadly menace to England. But 
German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff 
in his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of 
time needed to break her bonds by submarine warfare 
before America could send over great armies to Europe. 
The German war lords were wrong again in underesti- 
mating the defensive and offensive success of the British 
navy and mercantile marine against submarine activi- 
ties. By those miscalculations they lost the war in the 
long run, and by other errors they made their loss more 
certain. 

One mistake they made was their utter callousness re- 
garding the psychology and temper of their soldiers and 
civiHan population. They put a greater strain upon 
them than human nature could bear, and by driving their 
fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they 
doped their people with false promises which were never 
fulfilled, they sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which 
finally launched them into gulfs of ruin. I have read 
nothing more horrible than the cold-blooded cruelty of 
Ludendorff's Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at 
self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of miUions 
of men upon a gambhng chance of victory with the haz- 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 453 

ards weighted against him, as he admits. Writing of 
January, 1917, he says: "A collapse on the part of Russia 
was by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, 
not reckoned upon by any one. . . . Failing the U-boat 
campaign we reckoned with the collapse of the Quadruple 
AlHance during 1917." Yet with that enormous risk 
visible ahead, LudendorfF continued to play the grand jeu^ 
the great game, and did not advise any surrender of 
imperial ambitions in order to obtain a peace for his 
people, and was furious with the Majority party in the 
Reichstag for preparing a peace resolution. The collapse 
of Russia inspired him with new hopes of victory in the 
west, and again he prepared to sacrifice masses of men 
in the slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this 
time fatally. His time-table was out of gear. The U- 
boat war had failed. American manhood was pouring 
into France, and German soldiers on the Russian front 
had been infected with ideas most dangerous to Ger- 
man discipHne and the *'will to win." At the end, as at 
the beginning, the German war lords failed to understand 
the psychology of human nature as they had failed to 
understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great 
Britain, and of America. One of the most important 
admissions in history is made by LudendorfF when he 
writes : 

"Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the 
outbreak of the revolution in Russia. On the one side 
the government was dominated by the fear that the 
infection would spread, and on the other by the feeling 
of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses 
of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning 
as it was through a combination of innumerable cir- 
cumstances." 

So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought 

they were directing the destiny of the world were merely 

caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings 

and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death, 

which has happened before in the folly of mankind. 
30 



454 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

IJ 

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line 
we saw the full ruthlessness of war as never before on the 
western front, in the laying waste of a beautiful country- 
side, not by rational fighting, but by carefully organized 
destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that it was 
in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is 
only that our laws of war are not justified by any code of 
humanity above that of primitive savages. "The de- 
cision to retreat," he says, "was not reached without a 
painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness 
that was bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to 
lower our own. But as it was necessary for military 
reasons we had no choice. It had to be carried out. . . . 
The whole movement was a brilliant performance. . . . 
The retirement proved in a high degree remunerative." 

I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I 
went into beautiful little towns like Peronne, where the 
houses were being gutted by smoldering fire, and into 
hundreds of villages where the enemy had just gone out 
of them after touching off explosive charges which had 
made all their cottages collapse like card houses, their 
roofs spread flat upon their ruins, and their churches, 
after centuries of worship in them, fall into chaotic heaps 
of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of old French 
chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now 
a litter of brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron- 
work above open vaults where not even the dead had 
been left to lie in peace. I saw the little old fruit-trees of 
French peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees 
along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar 
our passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the 
roadways, which had to be bridged for our traffic of men 
and guns, following hard upon the enemy's retreat. 

There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled 
through this desolation. At a short distance many of the 
villages seemed to stand as before the war. One expected 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 455 

to find inhabitants there. But upon close approach one 
saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out 
from cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets 
of the ruins in a silence that was broken only by the sound 
of one's own voice or by a few shells crashing into the 
gutted houses. The enemy was in the next village, or 
the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of 
machine-gunners. 

In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by con- 
traptions with objects lying amid the litter, he had left 
"booby traps" to blow our men to bits if they knocked 
a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a fountain-pen, 
or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was 
eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. 
I little knew when I walked round the tower of the town 
hall of Bapaume that in another week, with the enemy 
far away, it would go up in dust and ashes. Only a few 
of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. 
Our engineers found most of them before they were 
touched ofi^, but one went down dugouts or into ruined 
houses with a sense of imminent danger. All through 
the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling 
of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose 
bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old 
clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts and in the 
ruins they had made. 

In some few villages there were living people left be- 
hind, some hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, 
some thousands. They had been driven in from the 
other villages burning around them, their own villages, 
whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people 
who had lived under German rule and talked with many 
of them — old women, wrinkled like dried-up apples, young 
women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp cheek- 
bones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of 
French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by 
years of hunger that was not quite starvation. It was 
from these people that I learned a good deal about the 



4S6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the 
Somme. They told me of the terror of these men at the 
increasing fury of our gun-fire, of their desertion and re- 
volt to escape the slaughter, and of their rage against the 
"Great People" who used them for gun-fodder. Habit- 
ually many of them talked of the war as the "Great 
Swindle." These French civiHans hated the Germans in 
the mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with 
shrill passion at the thought of German discipline, fines, 
punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered in 
these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to 
parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly every one of 
these people had something good to say about some 
German soldier who had been billeted with them. "He 
was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me 
and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he 
told me that the village was to be destroyed." Even 
some of the German officers had deplored this destruction. 
"The world will have a right to call us barbarians," said 
one of them in Ham. "But what can we do? We are 
under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is 
the cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of 
war." 

On the whole it seemed they had not misused the 
women. I heard no tales of actual atrocity, though some 
of brutal passion. But many women shrugged their 
shoulders when I questioned them about this and said: 
"They had no need to use violence in their way of love- 
making. There were many volunteers." 

They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as 
though touching money and said, "You understand?" 

I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and 
saw a crowd of young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, 
just arrived from the liberated districts. "All those are 
the children of German fathers," said the old Reverend 
Mother. "That is the worst tragedy of war. How will 
God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer 
for the guilty." 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 457 

Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a 
house in Cologne, where a British outpost was on the 
Hohenzollern bridge. There was a babies' creche in an 
upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty little 
ones whose chorus of "Guten Tag! Guten Tag!" was Hke 
the quacking of ducks. 

"After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them," 

"And*then?"Iasked. 

"And then many of them will die." 

She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in 
Amiens, and of the old Reverend Mother. 

" How will God punish all this ? Alas ! it is the innocent 
who suffer for the guilty." 

Of those things General LudendorfF does not write in 
his Memoirs^ which deal with the strategy and machinery 
of war. 

Ill 

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of fol- 
lowing up the German retreat, across that devastated 
country, with masses of men. He sent forward outposts 
to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and pre- 
pared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the hues 
round Arras. This new battle by British troops was dic- 
tated by French strategy rather than by ours. General 
Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was organizing a great 
offensive in the Champagne and desired the British army 
to strike first and keep on striking in order to engage and 
exhaust German divisions until he was ready to launch 
his own legions. The "secret" of his preparations was 
known by every officer in the French army and by Hin- 
denburg and his staff, who prepared a new method of 
defense to meet it. The French officers with whom I 
talked were supremely confident of success. "We shall 
go through," they said. "It is certain. Anybody who 
thinks otherwise is a traitor who betrays his country by 
the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will deal the death- 



458 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

blow." So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, and 
a friend in the infantry of the Hne, over a cup of coffee in 
an estaminet crammed with other French soldiers who 
were on their way to the Champagne front. 

Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April i6th, 
seven days after the British had captured the heights of 
Vimy and gone far to the east of Arras, Hindenburg was 
ready. He adopted his ''elastic system of defense," 
which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his 
troops beyond the range of the French barrage fire, leav- 
ing only a few outposts to camouflage the withdrawal 
and be sacrificed for the sake of the others (those German 
outposts must have disliked their martyrdom under 
orders, and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were ex- 
hilarated by the thought of their heroic service). He also 
withdrew the full power of his artillery beyond the range 
of French counter-battery work and to such a distance 
that when it was the German turn to fire the French 
infantry would be beyond the effective protection of their 
own guns. They were to be allowed an easy walk 
through to their death-trap. That is what happened. 
The French infantry, advancing with masses of black 
troops in the Colonial Corps in the front-line of assault, 
all exultant and inspired by a belief in victory, swept 
through the forward zone of the German defenses, aston- 
ished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity of Germans, 
until an annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and 
smashed their human waves. From French officers and 
nurses I heard appalling tales of this tragedy. The death- 
wail of the black troops froze the blood of Frenchmen with 
horror. Their own losses were immense in a bloody 
shambles. I was told by French officers that their losses 
on the first day of battle were 1 50,000 casualties, and these 
figures were generally believed. They were not so bad 
as that, though terrible. Semi-official figures state that 
the operations which lasted from April i6th to April 25th 
cost France 28,000 killed on the field of battle, 5,000 who 
died of wounds in hospital, 4,000 prisoners, and 80,000 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 459 

wounded. General Nivelle's offensive was called ofF, and 
French officers who had said, "We shall break through. 
... It is certain," now said: **We came up against a bee 
de gaz. As you English would say, we 'got it in the neck.' 
It is a great misfortune," 

The battle of Arras, in which the British army was en- 
gaged, began on April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there 
was a gale of sleet and snow. From ground near the old 
city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when the 
Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the 
German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and 
flame. From one of old Vauban's earthworks outside the 
walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond 
the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, 
through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was 
immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell 
upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was 
captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left 
and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right. By 
the afternoon the entire living German population, more 
than seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down 
below in the valley on our side of the lines, and on the 
ridge were many of their dead as I saw them afterward 
horribly mangled by shell-fire in the upheaved earth. 
The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper 
— "Uncle Harper," he was called — had done as well as 
the Canadians, though they had less honor, and took as 
many prisoners. H. D. was their divisional sign as I saw 
it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. 
"Well, General," said a Scottish sergeant, "they don't 
call us Harper's Duds any more!" . . . On the right Eng- 
lish county troops of the 12th Division, 3d Division, and 
others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had 
broken through, deeply and widely, capturing many men 
and guns after hard fighting round machine-gun redoubts. 
That night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly 
from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by 
Arras, where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in. 



46o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

other days of history. They herded together with their 
bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow 
and giving a little human warmth. All night through 
a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with 
his head bowed on his breast. Every now and then he 
said: "It is cold! It is cold!" And our men lay out in 
the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy 
Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, 
in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead 
in the mangled earth about them. 

LudendorfF admits the severity of that defeat. 

"The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad 
beginning to the capital fighting during this year. 

"April loth and the succeeding days were critical days. 
A breach twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide 
and as much as six thousand yards and more in depth is 
not a thing to be mended without more ado. It takes a 
good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and 
guns as well as munitions that results from such a breach. 
It was the business of the Supreme Command to provide 
reserves on a large scale. But in view of the troops avail- 
able, and of the war situation, it was simply not possible 
to hold a second division in readiness behind each divi- 
sion that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day 
like April 9th upset all calculations. It was a matter of 
days before a new front could be formed and consolidated. 
Even after the troops were ultimately in line the issue of 
the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very mate- 
rially upon whether the enemy followed up his initial 
success with a fresh attack and by fresh successes made it 
difficult for us to create a firm front. In view of the 
weakening of the line that inevitably resulted, such suc- 
cesses were only too easy to achieve. 

"From April loth onward the English attacked in the 
breach in great strength, but after all not in the grand 
manner; they extended their attack on both wings, espe- 
cially to the southward as far as Bullecourt. On April 
nth they gained Monchy, while we during the night 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 461 

before the 12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23 d 
and 28th, and also May 3d, were again days of heavy, 
pitched battle. In between there was some bitter local 
fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor 
successful counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost 
ground slightly at various points." 

I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras 
in the days that followed the first day. I remember the 
sinister beauty of the city itself, when there was a surging 
traffic of men and guns through its ruined streets in spite 
of long-range shells which came crashing into the houses. 
Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked 
like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowd- 
ed Arras had their pipe-bands there and they played 
in the Petite Place, and the skirl of the pipes shattered 
against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels 
beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the 
German lines, and I went along them when one line of 
men was going into battle and another was coming back, 
wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the 
fumes of gas in their lungs — their steel hats clinking as 
they groped past one another. In vaults each side of these 
passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of 
candles stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, 
with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of 
Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long 
queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons 
who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted 
roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, 
patient, muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or men with 
smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward 
to the dark passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. 
On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and stom- 
ach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras- 
Cambrai road was a death-trap for our transport and I 
saw the bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. 
Dead horses were thick on each side of an avenue of trees 
on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood and 



462 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

bowels. The traffic policeman on "point duty" on the 
Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel 
helmet, as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his 
head a little at the scream of a shell which plunged through 
the gable of a corner house above him. There was a 
Pioneer battalion along the road out to Observatory 
Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending 
the road beyond the last trench, through which our men 
had smashed their way. They were busy with bricks 
and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells plowing holes 
in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one 
morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as 
though asleep. They were dead, but their comrades 
worked on grimly, with no joy of labor in their sweat. 

Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the val- 
ley of the Scarpe. I saw it first when there was a white 
village there, hardly touched by fire, and afterward when 
there was no village. I was in the village below Observa- 
tory Ridge on the morning of April nth when cavalry 
was massed on that ground, waiting for orders to go into 
action. The headquarters of the cavalry division was in 
a ditch covered by planks, and the cavalry generals and 
their staffs sat huddled together with maps over their 
knees. *' I am afraid the general is busy for the moment," 
said a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked 
about the fields and said, "It's very unhealthy here." I 
agreed with him. The bodies of many young soldiers lay 
about. Five-point-nines (5.9's) were coming over in a 
haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But 
some squadrons of the loth Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, 
and the Blues were ordered to take Monchy, and rode 
up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German 
gunners and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses 
were killed in the village or outside it, and the men suf- 
fered many casualties, including their general — Bulkely 
Johnson — whose body I saw carried back on a stretcher 
to the ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It 
is an astonishing thing that two withered old French 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 463 

women stayed in the village all through the fighting. 
When our troops rode in these women came running for- 
ward, frightened and crying "CamaradesI" as though in 
fear of the enemy. When our men surrounded them they 
were full of joy and held up their scraggy old faces to be 
kissed by these troopers. Afterward Monchy was filled 
with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers crawled out from 
the ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be attacked 
and captured again by our infantry of the 15th and 
37th Divisions, who were also badly hammered. 

Heroic folly ! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory 
Hill stood to their horses, staring up at a German airplane 
which came overhead, careless of our "Archies." The 
eye of the German pilot must have widened at the sight 
of that mass of men and horses. He carried back glad 
tidings to the guns. 

One of the cavalry officers spoke to me. 

*'You look ill." 

"No, I'm all right. Only cold." 

The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a 
night in the open. 

"Do you think the Germans will get their range as far 
as this? I'm nervous about the men and the horses. 
We've been here for hours, and it seems no good." 

I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly 
the herald of long-range shells. They came within a few 
minutes. Some men and horses were killed. I was with 
a Highland officer and we took cover in a ditch not more 
than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close, 
scattering us with dirt. 

"Let's strike away from the road," said Major Schiach. 
**They always tape it out." 

We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get 
there . . . other men had to stay. 

The battles to the east of Arras that went before the 
capture of Monchy and followed it were hard, nagging 
actions along the valley of the Scarpe, which formed a 
glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to machine- 



464 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after 
week, for no object apparent to our battalion officers and 
men, who did not know that they were doing team-work 
for the French. The Londoners of the 56th Division 
made a record advance through Neuville-Vitasse to Henin 
and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg 
system across the little Cojeul River by Wancourt. 
There was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when 
East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn 
come, revealing the enemy between them and our main 
line, and had to hack their way through if they could. 
There were many who could not, and even divisional 
generals were embittered by these needless losses and by 
the hard driving of their men, saying fierce things about 
our High Command. 

Their language was mild compared with that of some 
of our young officers. I remember one I met near Henin. 
He was one of a group of three, all gunner officers who 
were looking about for better gun positions not so clearly 
visible to the enemy, who was in two little woods — the 
Bois de Sart and Bois Vert — which stared down upon 
them like green eyes. Some of their guns had been de- 
stroyed, many of their horses killed; some of their men. 
A few minutes before our meeting a shell had crashed 
into a bath close to their hut, where men were washing 
themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood 
and bits of flesh. The younger officer stared at me under 
the tilt forward of his steel hat and said, "Hullo, Gibbs!" 
I had played chess with him at Groom's Cafe in Fleet 
Street in days before the war. I went back to his hut 
and had tea with him, close to that bath, hoping that we 
should not be cut up with the cake. There were noises 
"ofF,'* as they say in stage directions, which were enor- 
mously disconcerting to one's peace of mind, and not 
very far off. I had heard before some hard words about 
our generalship and stafF-work, but never anything so 
passionate, so violent, as from that gunner officer. His 
view of the business was summed up in the word "mur- 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 465 

der." He raged against the impossible orders sent down 
from headquarters, against the brutality with which men 
were left in the line week after week, and against the 
monstrous, abominable futility of all our so-called strategy. 
His nerves were in rags, as I could see by the way in which 
his hand shook when he Hghted one cigarette after an- 
other. His spirit was in a flame of revolt against the 
misery of his sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of 
death. Every shell that burst near Henin sent a shudder 
through him. I stayed an hour in his hut, and then went 
away toward Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire follow- 
ing along the way. I looked back many times to the 
valley, and to the ridges where the enemy lived above it, 
invisible but deadly. The sun was setting and there was 
a tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical beauty over 
the landscape despite the desert that war had made 
there, leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees 
where once there were good villages with church spires 
rising out of sheltering woods. The German gunners 
were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting 
heavily again amid our gun positions. 

Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places 
of extreme unhealthfulness where our men had fought 
their way up to the Hindenburg line, or, as the Germans 
called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and Cherisy were 
targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among 
the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who Hved 
close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them 
always. They were inhabitants, not visitors. The Aus- 
traUans settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it 
after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter 
grudge against tanks which had failed them and some 
Enghsh troops who were held up on the left while they 
went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian 
Division lost three thousand men in an experimental 
attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their 
gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of 
death as they called it, and Austrahan gunners made 



466 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

little slit trenches and scuttled into them when the Ger^ 
mans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and 
wheels and breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bas- 
tion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down the 
valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went 
walking there with another war correspondent and an 
Austrahan officer who at a great pace led us round about, 
amid 5.9's, and debouched a little to see one of our am- 
munition-dumps exploding like a Brock's Benefit, and 
chattered brightly under "woolly bears" which made a 
rending tumult above our heads. I think he enjoyed his 
afternoon out from staff-work in the headquarters huts. 
Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I think he 
was only brave. I hated those hours, but put on the 
mask that royalty wears when it takes an intelligent in- 
terest in factory-work. 

The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty 
clearing stations day by day, week by week, and I saw 
the crowded Butchers' Shops of war, where busy surgeons 
lopped at limbs and plugged men's wounds. 

Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the 
beginning and as at the end, the spirits of British soldiers 
kept high unless their bodies were laid low. Between 
battles they enjoyed their spells of rest behind the lines. 
In that early summer of '17 there was laughter in Arras, 
lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed 
pipers and brass bands, jolly comradeship in billets with 
paneled walls upon which perhaps Robespierre's shadow 
had fallen in the candle-Hght before the Revolution, when 
he was the good young man of Arras. 

As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I list- 
ened to the pipers who marched round the table and 
stood behind the colonel's chair and mine, and played the 
martial music of Scotland, until something seemed to 
break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a 
French friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat 
next to the colonel, and the eight pipers played behind his 
chair. He went pale, deadly white, and presently swooned 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 467 

off his chair . . . and the Gordons thought it the finest 
tribute to their pipes! 

The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challeng- 
ing cries, Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and passion, 
though they were tangled sometimes in the maze . . . 
many of them fell in the fields outside or in the bogs of 
Flanders. 

On the western side of Arras there were field sports by 
London men, and Surreys, BulFs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suf- 
folks, and Devons. They played cricket between their 
turns in the line, lived in the sunshine of the day, and did 
not look forward to the morrow. At such times one 
found no trace of war's agony in their faces or their eyes 
nor in the quality of their laughter. 

My dwelling-place at that time, with other war corre- 
spondents, was in an old white chateau between St.-Pol 
and Hesdin, from which we motored out to the line. Arras 
way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street. The 
contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond 
was profound and bewildering. Behind the old white 
house were winding walks through little woods beside 
the stream which Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt; 
tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils 
and all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in 
the springtime of France. Birds sang their love-songs 
in the thickets. The tits twittered fearfully at the laugh 
of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain at one's 
heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and 
trudging over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of 
our task, week by week, month by month. 

"This makes for madness," said a friend of mine, a 
musician surprised to find himself a soldier. "In the 
morning we see boys with their heads blown off" — ^that 
morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had 
passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up 
stared at them with a silly smile and said, "They've 
copped it all right!" and went on to the same risk; and 
we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells had 



468 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we 
felt a Httle sick in the stomach — -"and in the afternoon 
we walk through this garden where the birds are singing. 
, . . There is no sense in it. It's just midsummer mad- 
ness!" 

But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his 
throat, and died. One of the best, as I knew him at his 
best. 

IV 

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered 
out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and 
Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery 
of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a 
vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of 
ridges through Flanders, of which this was the southern 
hook, and then to liberate the Belgian coast as far inland 
as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack with shore- 
going tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first 
blow at the Messines Ridge was completely and wonder- 
fully successful, due to the explosion of seventeen enor- 
mous mines under the German positions, followed by an 
attack "in depth," divisions passing through each other, 
or "leap-frogging," as it was called, to the final objectives 
against an enemy demorahzed by the earthquake of the 
explosions. 

For two years there had been fierce underground fight- 
ing at Hill 60 and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the 
Germans had listened to one another's workings, racing 
to strike through first to their enemies' galleries and touch 
off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided by 
the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnel- 
ers, had beaten the enemy into sheer terror of their method 
of fighting and they had abandoned it, believing that we 
had also. But we did not, as they found to their cost. 

I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 
and elsewhere. I had gone into the darkness of the 
tunnels, crouching low, striking my steel hat with sharp. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 469 

spine-jarring knocks against the low beams overhead, 
coming into galleries where one could stand upright and 
walk at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of 
great engines, the murmur of men's voices in dark crypts, 
seeing numbers of men sleeping on bunks in the gloom of 
caverns close beneath the German lines, and listening 
through a queer little instrument called a microphone, 
by which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German 
galleries a thousand yards away, the dropping of a pick 
or shovel, the knocking out of German pipes against 
charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument, 
more perfect than the enemy's, that we had beaten him, 
and by the grim determination of those underground men 
of ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they 
worked, who coughed in the dampness of the caves, and 
who packed high explosives at the shaft-heads — hundreds 
of tons of it — -for the moment when a button should be 
touched far away, and an electric current would pass 
down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be 
blown into dust. 

That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places 
below the Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty 
on the morning of June 7th, after a quiet night of war, 
when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory way 
and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-shells, 
and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel 
Hill. I saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and 
flame gush out of them as though the fires of hell had risen. 
A terrible sight, as the work of men against their fellow- 
creatures. ... It was the signal for seven hundred and 
fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field- 
guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting 
shells English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved 
forward in dense waves. It was almost a "walk-over." 
Only here and there groups of Germans served their 
machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were 
stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, 
slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the 



470 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, 
wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed 
there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete 
Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 
some of our cavalry had passed this way when the Hos- 
pice was a big red-brick building with wings and out- 
houses and a large community of nuns and children. 
Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kem- 
mel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left 
but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses 
were comparatively small, though some brave men had 
died, including Major Willie Redmond, whose death in 
Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in Ireland. 
LudendorjBP admits the severity of the blow: 
"The moral effect of the explosions was simply stag- 
gering. . . , The 7th of June cost us dear, and, owing to 
the success of the enemy attack, the price we paid was 
very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the 
front was again secure. The British army did not press 
its advantage; apparently it only intended to improve 
its position for the launching of the great Flanders offen- 
sive. It thereupon resumed operations between the old 
Arras battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. 
The object of the enemy was to wear us down and dis- 
tract our attention from Ypres." 

That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks 
at Lens, some of which I saw from ground beyond Notre 
Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the enemy 
country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long 
chain of mining villages which girdled Lens itself, where 
every house was a machine-gun fort above deep tunnels. 
I saw them after desperate struggles, covered in clay, 
parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. 
Lens was the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the Eng- 
lish troops of the First Army, and it was only owing to 
other battles they were called upon to fight in Flanders 
that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy 
to escape. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 471 

All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flan- 
ders, with its ambitious objects. But when the battles 
of Flanders began the year was getting past its middle 
age, and events on other fronts had upset the strategical 
plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The 
failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the 
Champagne were disastrous to us. It liberated many 
German divisions who could be sent up to relieve ex- 
hausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the 
enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, 
we attacked him when all was quiet on the French front. 
The collapse of Russia was now happening and our policy 
ought to have been to save men for the tremendous 
moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. 
So it seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy 
after the event. 

I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport 
and saw secret preparations for the coast offensive. We 
were building enormous gun emplacements at Malo-les- 
Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged in sand- 
dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the 
dunes. Our artillery positions were mapped out. 

"Three shots to one, sir," said Sir Henry Rawlinson 
to the King, "that's the stuff to give them!" 

But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of 
importance to the strategical position, but ghastly to two 
battalions of the ist Division, cut off on a spit of land at 
Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a fury of fire. 

At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new 
poison-gas — mustard gas — which raised blisters and 
burned men's bodies where the vapor was condensed 
into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or 
more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I 
saw hundreds of these cases in the 3d Canadian casualty 
clearing station on the coast, and there were thousands 
all along our front. At Oast Dunkerque, near Nieuport, 
I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a burning sensa- 
tion about the Hps and eyehds, and for a week afterward 



472 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings at 
the heart which at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. 
It was enough to "put the wind up." Our men dreaded 
the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in its approach. 
It was one of the new plagues of war. 



The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 
31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than 
had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the 
Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two 
thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The 
enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great 
groups, often shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. 
The natural strength of his position along the ridges, 
which were like a great bony hand outstretched through 
Flanders, with streams or "beeks," as they are called, 
flowing in the valleys which ran between the fingers of 
that clawHke range, were strengthened by chains of little 
concrete forts or "pill-boxes," as our soldiers called them, 
so arranged that they could defend one another by enfilade 
machine-gun fire. These were held by garrisons of ma- 
chine-gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was to 
break up our waves of attack until, even if successful in 
gaining ground, only small bodies of survivors would be 
in a position to resist the counter-attacks launched by 
German divisions farther back. The strength of the pill- 
boxes made of concrete two inches thick resisted every- 
thing but the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were not 
easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them 
fought often with the utmost courage, even when sur- 
rounded, and again and again this method of defense 
proved terribly effective against the desperate heroic 
assaults of British infantry. 

What our men had suffered in earlier battles was sur- 
passed by what they were now called upon to endure. 
All the agonies of war which I have attempted to describe 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 473 

were piled up In those fields of Flanders. There was 
nothing missing in the list of war's abominations. A few 
days after the battle began the rains began, and hardly 
ceased for four months. Night after night the skies 
opened and let down steady torrents, which turned all 
that country into one great bog of slime. Those little 
rivers or "beeks," which ran between the knobby fingers 
of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their 
channels and slopped over into broad swamps. The hur- 
ricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon 
the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up 
deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits 
which the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only 
way of walking was by "duck-boards," tracks laid down 
across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, 
laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duck- 
board walk men must march in single file, and if one of 
our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on 
those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few 
yards) and fell off', he sank up to his knees, often up to 
his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. 
If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about 
him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was 
helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire 
men — the 66th — took eleven hours in making three miles 
or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to 
attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. 
Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of 
men, almost every division in the British army at one 
time or another, struggled on through that Slough of De- 
spond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at 
Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then 
the Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when 
all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast 
attack was never launched. 

Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions 
of that six months' horror were "exaggerated." As a 
man who knows something of the value of words, and who 



474 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and went 
out from Ypres many times during those months to the 
Westhoek Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg 
and Inverness Copse and Glencourse Wood, and beyond 
to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his dead lay 
in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks 
that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron 
by German gun-fire (thirty were knocked out by direct 
hits on the first day of battle), and where our own guns 
were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy shells, 
I say now that nothing that has been written is more than 
the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, 
and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of 
that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished. 

They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners 
when batteries sank up to their axles as I saw them often 
w^hile they fired almost unceasingly for days and nights 
without sleep, and were living targets of shells which burst 
about them. They were months of battle in which our 
men advanced through slime into slime, under the slash 
of machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet 
to the skin, chilled to the bone, plastered up to the eyes 
in mud, with a dreadful way back for walking wounded, 
and but little chance sometimes for wounded who could 
not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted 
almost to annihilation to many battalions, and whole 
divisions lost as much as 50 per cent, of their strength 
after a few days in action, before they were "relieved." 
Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no 
body of men could lose more than 25 per cent, of their 
fighting strength in an action without being broken in 
spirit. Our men lost double that, and more than double, 
but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost 
their hope. 

The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks 
on a line of pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, 
and Square Farm, below the Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 
men in casualties out of 6,049. Those were not uncom- 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 475 

mon losses. They were usual losses. One clay's fighting 
in Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten 
thousand casualties, and they were considered "light" 
by the Higher Command in relation to the objects 
achieved. 

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told 
me that in his opinion the official communiques and the 
war correspondents' articles gave only one side of the 
picture of war and were too glowing in their optimism. 
(I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being 
black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) "We tell the 
pubHc," he said, "that an enemy division has been 'shat- 
tered.' That is true. But so is mine. One of my brigades 
has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand men since 
the spring." He protested that there was not enough 
liaison between the fighting-officers and the Higher Com- 
mand, and could not blame them for their hatred of "the 
Staff." 

The story of the two Irish divisions — the 36th Ulster 
and 1 6th (Nationalist) — in their fighting on August i6th 
is black in tragedy. They were left in the line for sixteen 
days before the battle and were shelled and gassed inces- 
santly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every day 
groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were 
bloody and the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. 
Every day scores of wounded crawled back through the 
bogs, if they had the strength to crawl. Before the 
attack on August i6th the Ulster Division had lost nearly 
two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two 
thousand more, and over one hundred officers. The i6th 
Division lost as many men before the attack and more 
officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in hold- 
ing the line. On the night before the battle hundreds'^of 
men were gassed. Then their comrades attacked and 
lost over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty- 
two officers. All the ground below two knolls of earth 
called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which were defended by Ger- 
man pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli, Beck 



476 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles. In 
spite of their dreadful losses the survivors in the Irish 
battalion went forward to the assault with desperate 
valor on the morning of August i6th, surrounded the 
pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun 
fire, and toward the end of the day small bodies of these 
men had gained a footing on the objectives which they 
had been asked to capture, but were then too weak to 
resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal 
Irish Fusiliers had been almost exterminated in their 
efforts to dislodge the enemy from Hill 37. They lost 
seventeen officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent, of 
their men. One company of four officers and one hun- 
dred men, ordered to capture the concrete fort known as 
Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four officers and seventy 
men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of seven- 
teen, and 66 per cent, of their men. 

The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their 
brigadiers called it murder. They were violent in their 
denunciation of the Fifth Army for having put their men 
into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy shelling, 
and after the battle they complained that they were cast 
aside like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort 
of the men who had survived. No motor-lorries were 
sent to meet them and bring them down, but they had to 
tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the 
i6th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, 
without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down 
south. 

I found a general opinion among officers and men, not 
only of the Irish Division, under the command of the 
Fifth Army, that they had been the victims of atrocious 
staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I saw 
of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same 
opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of 
the elderly officers, were arrogant and supercilious with- 
out revealing any symptoms of intelligence. If they had 
wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of ineffi- 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 47/ 

ciency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of 
their own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army 
in Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quen- 
tin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely cour- 
teous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of 
duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for 
many tragic happenings, he was badly served by some of 
his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional 
staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organi- 
zation, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion 
of speech. 

"You must be glad to leave Flanders," I said to a 
group of officers trekking toward the Cambrai salient. 

One of them answered, violently: 

"God be thanked we are leaving the Fifth Army area!" 

In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid 
a tribute to the Second Army, and especially to Sir John 
Harington, its chief of staff. There was a thoroughness 
of method, a minute attention to detail, a care for the 
comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second 
Army staff which did at least inspire the troops with the 
belief that whatever they did in the lighting-lines had 
been prepared, and would be supported, with every pos- 
sible help that organization could provide. That belief 
was founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but 
by strenuous work, a driving zeal, and the fine intelli- 
gence of a chief of staff whose brain was like a high-power 
engine. 

I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army 
headquarters at Cassel, in a room where many of the 
great battles had been planned, when Sir John Harington 
made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert 
Plumer, and he, as General Plumer's chief of staff, had 
been ordered to Italy — in the middle of a battle — to 
report on the situation which had become so grave there. 
He expressed his regret that he should have to leave 
Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad 
that Passchendaele had been captured before his going. 



478 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

In front of him was the map of the great range from 
Wytschaete to Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and 
smiled and said : *' I often used to think how much of that 
range we should get this year. Now it is nearly all ours." 
He thanked the war correspondents for all their articles, 
which had been very helpful to the army, and said how 
glad he had been to have our co-operation. 

"It was my ambition," he said, speaking with some 
emotion, "to make cordial relations between battalion 
officers and the staff, and to get rid of that criticism 
(sometimes just) which has been directed against the 
staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fight- 
ing soldiers that the success of a battle depends greatly 
on efficient staff-work, and has inspired them with con- 
fidence in the preparations and organization behind the 
lines." 

Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to 
me still, in my memory of all that ghastly fighting, that 
the fine mechanism of the Second Army applied to those 
battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the 
first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have 
been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judg- 
ment to ask masses of men to attack in conditions where 
they had not a dog's chance of victory, except at a cost 
which made it of Pyrrhic irony. 

Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as 
our own strength in man-power. He could less afford 
to lose his one man than we could our three, now that the 
United States had entered the war. Ludendorff has de- 
scribed the German agony, and days of battle which he 
calls "terrific," inflicting "enormous loss" upon his 
armies and increasing his anxiety at the "reduction of 
our fighting strength." 

"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which 
no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled 
against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare exist- 
ence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. 
The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 479 

field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony 
unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the at- 
tacker wallowed forward, slowly but continually, and in 
dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by the 
hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our 
lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the 
mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. 
The struggle was man to man, and — only too often — it 
was the mass that won. 

"What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, 
and suffered during the Flanders battle will stand in his 
honor for all time as a brazen monument that he set him- 
self with his own hands on enemy soil! 

"The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the 
spring of 191 8, we occupied the battlefield, it presented 
a horrible spectacle with its many unburied dead. Their 
number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of them were 
enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had 
met here a hero's death. 

"And yet the truth must be told; individual units no 
longer surmounted as before the demoralizing influences 
of the defensive campaign. 

"October 26th and 30th and November 6th and loth 
were also days of pitched battle of the heaviest kind. 
The enemy stormed like a wild bull against the iron wall 
that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base. He 
hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled 
it against Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Ghelu- 
velt, and Zandvoorde; at very many points he dented 
the line. It seemed as if he would charge down the wall; 
but, although a slight tremor passed through its founda- 
tion, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to 
receive were extremely grave. Tactically everything had 
been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery prac- 
tice had materially improved. Behind nearly every fight- 
ing-division there stood a second, as rear wave. In the 
third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that 
the wear and tear of the enemy's forces was high. But 



48o NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong 
and, what was equally important, possessed extraordinary 
will-power.'* 

That was the impression of the cold brain directing the 
machinery of war from German headquarters. More 
human and more tragic is a letter of an unknown German 
officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling 
the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield: 

"If it were not for the men who have been spared me 
on this fierce day and are lying around me, and looking 
timidly at me, I should shed hot and bitter tears over the 
terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On 
the morning of September i8th my dugout containing 
seventeen men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am 
the only one who withstood the maddening bombardment 
of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine 
the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those 
few hours. After crawling out through the bleeding rem- 
nants of my comrades, and through the smoke and debris, 
wandering and running in the midst of the raging gun-fire 
in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at any 
moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flan- 
ders means endless human endurance. Flanders means 
blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means 
heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death." 

To British and to Germans it meant the same. 



VI 

During the four and a half months of that fighting the 
war correspondents were billeted in the old town of 
Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a 
wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could 
see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked 
eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and 
in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire 
and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet 
was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 481 

the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant 
shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by 
vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. 
The priests used to tap at my door when I came back 
from the battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered 
face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague 
me like that, saying: 

"What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, per- 
haps ! Alas ! it is a slaughter on both sides." 

"It is all your fault," I said once, chaflingly, to get rid 
of him. " You do not pray enough." 

He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand. 

"Monsieur," he whispered, "after eighty years I nearly 
lose my faith in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why 
does not God give us victory? Alas! perhaps we have 
sinned too much!" 

One needed great faith for courage then, and my cour- 
age (never much to boast about) ebbed low those days, 
when I agonized over our losses and saw the suff"ering of 
our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our 
boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic 
vapors of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; 
and the mangled corpses of Germans who had died out- 
side their pill-boxes; and when I saw dead horses on the 
roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside 
their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of 
doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured 
blockhouses, where I took a nip of whisky with them 
now and then before they attacked again; and groups of 
dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their 
own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of 
wounded by tens of thousands. 

There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, be- 
yond Goldfish Chateau, which was made into a casualty 
clearing station, and scores of times when I passed it I 
saw it crowded with the "walking wounded," who had 
trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, 
fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no 



482 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

longer "cheerful" like the gay lads who came lightly 
wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life, excited by 
their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; 
boys in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. 
The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them. Their 
clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and 
hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel 
hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, 
were strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud 
who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on 
wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were 
stark in spirit still. 

"Only the mud beat us," they said. Man after man 
said that. 

" We should have gone much farther except for the mud." 

Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing 
stations for wounded, with surgeons at work, and I saw 
the same scenes there. They were not beyond the danger 
zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range 
shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. 
Some ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who 
had been standing in talk with a doctor was killed half- 
way through a sentence. 

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled 
by long-range high velocities which came howling over- 
head as I heard them scores of times in passing through 
those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to orders, 
and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia 
because of what was happening in the fields of horror that 
lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin 
road Ypres was sanctuary and God's heaven. 

The little old town of Cassel on the hill — where once a 
Duke of York marched up and then marched down again 
— ^was beyond shell-range, though the enemy tried to 
reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make 
holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its 
base. There is an inn there — the Hotel du Sauvage — 
which belongs now to English history, and Scottish and 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 483 

Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian. It was 
the last place along the road to Ypres where men who 
loved Hfe could get a dinner sitting with their knees 
below a table-cloth, with candle-light glinting in glasses, 
while outside the windows the flickering fires of death 
told them how short might be their tarrying in the good 
places of the world. This was a good place where the 
blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. 
Behind the desk was Mademoiselle Suzanne, "a dainty 
rogue in porcelain," with wonderfully bright eyes and just 
a little greeting of a smile for any young officer who looked 
her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever 
so long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever 
so long again. Sometimes it was a smile met in the mir- 
ror against the wall, to which Suzanne looked to touch her 
curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott, the pictures of life 
that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get that angle 
of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often 
blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door 
opened, and other officers came in with waterproofs sag- 
ging round their legs and top-boots muddy to the tags, 
abashed because they made pools of water on polished 
boards. 

'Tardon, Madame.'* 

*'Qa ne fait rien, Monsieur. ''^ 

There was a klip-klop of horses' hoofs in the yard. I 
thought of D'Artagnan and the Musketeers who might 
have ridden into this very yard, strode into this very 
room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame 
played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all 
kinds, and any accompaniment to any song. Our young 
officers sang. Some of them touched the piano with a 
loving touch and said, "Ye gods, a piano again!" and 
played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Pass- 
chendaele was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle 
with him, and played last of all, after other tunes, "The 
Long, Long Trail," which his comrades sang. 

"Come and play to us again," said Madame. 



'484 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"If I come back," said the boy. 

He did not come back along the road through Ypres to 
Cassel. 

From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On 
every moonhght night German raiders were about bomb- 
ing our camps and villages. One could see just below 
the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle 
and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where 
peasants and children were killed with them. For some 
strange reason Cassel itself was never bombed. 

"We are a nest of spies," said some of the inhabitants, 
but others had faith in a miraculous statue, and still 
others in Sir Herbert Plumer. 

Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at 
Mademoiselle Suzanne behind the desk. She did not 
show fear by the flicker of an eyehd, though ofiicers in the 
room were startled. 

*' Fous navez pas peur, meme de la mort?" ("You are 
not afraid, even of death?") I asked. 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

''Je rnen fiche de la mort!" (''I don't care a damn for 
death!") 

The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but 
barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, 
who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy. 
It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day 
without special permits from the A. P. M., who made 
trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode 
down into Cassel. They had ridden down from hell-fire 
to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth, and drink tea 
in a room again. They were refused permission, and their 
language to me about the A. P. M. was unprintable. 
They desired his blood and bones. They raised their 
hands to heaven to send down wrath upon all skunks 
dwelling behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind 
of comfort to fighting-men. They included the P. M. 
in their rage, and all staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne, 
and away back to Whitehall. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 485 

To cheer up the war correspondents' mess when we 
assembled at night after miserable days, and when in the 
darkness gusts of wind and rain clouted the window-panes 
and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were falling in 
near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds 
and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the com- 
pany sometimes of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who 
told merry little tales of executions and prison happen- 
ings at which he assisted in the course of his duty. 

I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death 
for cowardice (there were quite a number of lads like that). 
He was blindfolded by a gas-mask fixed on the wrong 
way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post. The firing- 
party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The 
boy was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and 
the A. P. M. had to shoot him twice with his revolver 
before he died. 

That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a 
gentleman who seemed to like his job and to enjoy these 
reminiscences. 

The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Pass- 
chendaele by the Canadians, and that year's fighting on 
the western front cost us 800,000 casualties, and though 
we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he reeled 
back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for 
what was to happen next year, and our men were too 
sorely tried. For the first time the British army lost its 
spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly de- 
pression among many officers and men with whom I came 
in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing 
except continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders. 

Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods 

above the limitations of nature. They were human 

beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, 

whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. 

Death had no allurement for them, except now and then 

as an escape from intolerable life under fire. They would 

have been superhuman if they had not revolted in spirit, 
32 



486 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

though still faithful to discipline, against the foul condi- 
tions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite of all they 
had, in that four months or so of fighting, achieved the 
greatest effort of human courage and endurance ever done 
by masses of men in obedience to command. 

VII 

At the end of those battles happened that surprising, 
audacious adventure in the Cambrai salient organized 
by the Third Army under General Byng, when on Novem- 
ber 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke through the Hin- 
denburg line, and infantry streamed through the breach, 
captured hundreds of guns, ten thousand prisoners, many 
villages and ridges, and gave a monstrous shock to the 
German High Command. 

The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of 
man-power with which it was attempted and supported. 
The divisions engaged had all been through the grinding 
mill of Flanders and were tired men. The artillery was 
made up largely of those batteries which had been axle- 
deep in Flanders mud. It was clearly understood by 
General Byng and Gen. Louis Vaughan, his chief of staff, 
that Sir Douglas Haig could not afford to give them 
strong reserves to exploit any success they might gain by 
surprise or to defend the captured ground against certain 
counter-attacks. It was to be a surprise assault by tanks 
and infantry, with the hope that the cavalry corps might 
find its gap at last and sweep round Cambrai before the 
enemy could recover and reorganize. With other corre- 
spondents I saw Gen. Louis Vaughan, who expounded the 
scheme before it was launched. That charming man, 
with his professional manner, sweetness of speech, gentle- 
ness of voice and gesture, like an Oxford don analyzing 
the war correspondence of Xenophon, made no secret of 
the economy with which the operation would have to be 
made. 

"We must cut our coat according to our cloth," he said. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 487 

The whole idea was to seize only as much ground as 
the initial success could gain, and not to press if resistance 
became strong. It was a gamble, with a chance of luck. 
The cavalry might do nothing, or score a big triumph. 
All depended on the surprise of the tanks. If they were 
discovered before the assault the whole adventure would 
fail at the start. 

They had been brought up secretly by night, four hun- 
dred of them, with supply-tanks for ammunition and 
petrol lying hidden in woods by day. So the artillery and 
infantry and cavalry had been concentrated also. The 
enemy believed himself secure in his Hindenburg line, 
which had been constructed behind broad hedges of 
barbed wire with such wide ditches that no tank could 
cross. 

How, then, would tanks cross? Ah, that was a little 
trick which would surprise the Germans mightily. Each 
tank would advance through the early morning mists 
with a bridge on its nose. The bridge was really a big 
** fascine," or bundle of fagots about a yard and a half 
in diameter, and controlled by a lever and chain from 
the interior of the tank. Having plowed through the 
barbed wire and reached the edge of the Hindenburg 
trench, the tank would drop the fascine into the center of 
the ditch, stretch out its long body, reach the bundle of 
fagots, find support on it, and use it as a stepping-stone 
to the other side. Very simple in idea and effect! 

So it happened, and the mists favored us^, as I saw on 
the morning of the attack at a little place called Beau- 
mont, near Villers Pluich. The enemy was completely 
surprised, caught at breakfast in his dugouts, rounded up 
in batches. The tanks went away through the breach 
they had made, with the infantry swarming round them, 
and captured Havrincourt, Hermies, Ribecourt, Gouzeau- 
court, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and a wide stretch of 
country forming a cup or amphitheater below a series of 
low ridges south of Bourlon Wood, where the ground rose 
again. 



488 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

It was a spectacular battle, such as we had never seen 
before, and during the following days, when our troops 
worked up to Bourlon Wood and through the intervening 
villages of Anneux, Graincourt, Containg, and Fontaine 
Notre Dame, I saw tanks going into action and cruising 
about like landships, with cavalry patrols riding over open 
ground, airplanes flying low over German territory, and 
masses of infantry beyond all trench-lines, and streams 
of liberated civilians trudging through the lines from 
Marcoing. The enemy was demoralized the first day 
and made only slight resistance. The chief losses of 
the tanks were due to a German major of artillery 
who served his own guns and knocked out a baker's 
dozen of these monsters as they crawled over the 
Flesquieres Ridge. I saw them lying there with the 
blood and bones of their pilots and crews within their 
steel walls. It was a Highland soldier who checked the 
German major. 

"You're a brave man," he said, "but you've got to 
dee," and ran him through the stomach with his bayonet. 
It was this check at the Flesquieres Ridge, followed by 
the breaking of a bridge at Masnieres under the weight 
of a tank and the holding of a trench-line called the 
Rumilly switch b}^ a battalion of Germans who raced to 
it from Cambrai before our men could capture it, which 
thwarted the plans of the cavalry. Our cavalry generals 
were in consultation at their headquarters, too far back 
to take immediate advantage of the situation. They 
waited for the capture of the Rumilly switch, and held up 
masses of cavalry whom I saw riding through the village 
of Ribecourt, with excitement and exaltation, because 
they thought that at last their chance had come. Finall}^ 
orders were given to cancel all previous plans to advance. 
Only one squadron, belonging to the Canadian Fort Garry 
Horse in General Seely's division, failed to receive the 
order (their colonel rode after them, but his horse slipped 
and fell before he caught them up), and it was their day 
of heroic folly. They rode fast and made their way 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 489 

through a gap in the wire cut by the troopers, and came 
under rifle- and machine-gun fire, which wounded the 
captain and several men. 

The command was carried on by a young lieutenant, 
who rode with his men until they reached the camouflaged 
road southeast of the village of Rumilly, where they went 
through in sections under the fire of the enemy hidden in 
the banks. Here they came up against a battery of field- 
guns, one of which fired point-blank at them. They 
charged the battery, putting the guns out of action and 
killing some of the gunners. Those who were not de- 
stroyed surrendered, and the prisoners were left to be 
sent back by the supports. The squadron then dealt 
with the German infantry in the neighborhood. Some of 
them fled, while some were killed or surrendered. All 
these operations were done at a gallop under fire from 
flanking blockhouses. The squadron then slowed down 
to a walk and took up a position in a sunken road one 
kilometer east of Rumilly. Darkness crept down upon 
them, and gradually they were surrounded by German 
infantry with machine-guns, so that they were in great 
danger of capture or destruction. Only five of their 
horses remained unhit, and the lieutenant in command 
decided that they must endeavor to cut their way through 
and get back. The horses were stampeded in the direc- 
tion of the enemy in order to draw the machine-gun fire, 
and while these riderless horses galloped wildly out of 
one end of the sunken road, the officer and his surviving 
troopers escaped from the other end. On the way back 
they encountered four bodies of the enemy, whom they 
attacked and routed. On one occasion their escape was 
due to the cunning of another young lieutenant, who 
spoke German and held conversations with the enemy in 
the darkness, deceiving them as to the identity of his 
force until they were able to take the German troops by 
surprise and hack a way through. This lieutenant was 
hit in the face by a bullet, and when he arrived back in 
Masnieres with his men in advance of the rear-guard he 



490 NOW IT. CAN BE TOLD 

was only able to make his report before falling in a state 
of collapse. 

Other small bodies of cavalry — among them the 8th 
Dragoons and 15th Hussars — had wild, heroic adventures 
in the Cambrai salient, where they rode under blasts of 
machine-gun fire and rounded up prisoners in the ruined 
villages of Noyelles and Fontaine Notre Dame. Some of 
them went into the Folie Wood nearby and met seven 
German ojfficers strolling about the glades, as though no 
war was on. They took them prisoners, but had to re- 
lease some of them later, as they could not be bothered 
with them. Later they came across six ammunition- 
wagons and destroyed them. In the heart of the wood 
was one of the German divisional headquarters, and one 
of our cavalry officers dismounted and approached the 
cottage stealthily, and looked through the windows. In- 
side was a party of German officers seated at a table, with 
beer mugs in front of them, apparently unconscious of 
any danger near them. Our officer fired his revolver 
through the windows and then, like a schoolboy who has 
thrown a stone, ran away as hard as he could and joined 
his troop. Youthful folly of gallant hearts! 

After the enemy's surprise his resistance stiffened and 
he held the village of Fontaine Notre Dame, and Bourlon 
Wood, on the hill above, with strong rear-guards. Very 
quickly, too, he brought new batteries into action, and 
things became unpleasant in fields and villages where our 
men, as I saw them on those days, hunted around for 
souvenirs in German dugouts and found field-glasses, 
automatic pistols, and other good booty. 

It seemed to me that the plan as outlined by Gen. Louis 
Vaughan, not to exploit success farther than justified by 
the initial surprise, was abandoned for a time. A brigade 
of Guards was put in to attack Fontaine Notre Dame, 
and suffered heavily from machine-gun fire before taking 
it. The 626. (Yorkshire) Division lost many good men 
in Bourlon Village and Bourlon Wood, into which the 
enemy poured gas-shells and high explosives. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 491 

Then on November 30th the Germans, under the direc- 
tion of General von Marwitz, came back upon us with 
a tiger's pounce, in a surprise attack which we ought to 
have anticipated. I happened to be on the way to Gou- 
zeaucourt early that morning, and, going through the 
village of Fins, next to it, I saw men straggling back in 
some disorder, and gun-teams wedged in a dense traffic 
moving in what seemed to me the wrong direction. 

"I don't know what to do," said a young gunner officer. 
"My battery has been captured and I can't get into touch 
with the brigade." 

"What has happened.?" I asked. 

He looked at me in surprise. 

"Don't you know.? The enemy has broken through." 

" Broken through where ? " 

The gunner officer pointed down the road. 

"At the present moment he's in Gouzeaucourt." 

I went northward, and saw that places like Hermies and 
Havrincourt, which had been peaceful spots for a few 
days, were under heavy fire. Bourlon Wood beyond was 
a fiery furnace. Hell had broken out again and things 
looked bad. There was a general packing up of dumps 
and field hospitals and heavy batteries. In Gouzeau- 
court and other places our divisional and brigade head- 
quarters were caught napping. Officers were in their 
pajamas or in their baths when they heard the snap of 
machine-gun bullets. I saw the Guards go forward to 
Gouzeaucourt for a counter-attack. They came along 
munching apples and whistfing, as though on peace 
maneuvers. Next day, after they had gained back Gou- 
zeaucourt, I saw many of them wounded, lying under 
tarpaulins, all dirty and bloody. 

The Germans had adopted our own way of attack. 
They had assembled masses of troops secretly, moving 
them forward by night under the cover of woods, so that 
our air scouts saw no movement by day. Our line was 
weakly held along the front — the 55th Division, thinned 
out by losses, was holding a line of thirteen thousand 



492 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

yards, three times as much as any troops can hold, in 
safety — and the German storm-troops, after a short, 
terrific bombardment, broke through to a distance of five 
miles. 

Our tired men, who had gained the first victory, fought 
heroic rear-guard actions back from Masnieres and Mar- 
coing, and back from Bourlon Wood on the northern side 
of the sahent. They made the enemy pay a high price 
in blood for the success of his counter-attack, but we lost 
many thousands of brave fellows, and the joy bells which 
had rung in London on November 20th became sad and 
ironical music in the hearts of our disappointed people. 

So ended 1917, our black year; and in the spring of 
191 8, after all the losses of that year, our armies on the 
western front were threatened by the greatest menace 
that had ever drawn near to them, and the British Empire 
was in jeopardy. 

VIII 

In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto 
had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of 
staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the 
Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy with 
some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas 
Haig's command. At that very time, also, after the 
bloody losses in Flanders, the French government and 
General Headquarters brought severe pressure upon the 
British War Council to take over a greater length of line 
in France, in order to release some of the older classes of 
the French army who had been under arms since 1914. 
We yielded to that pressure and Sir Douglas Haig ex- 
tended his Hnes north and south of St.-Quentin, where the 
Fifth Army, under General Gough, was intrusted with 
the defense. 

I went over all that new ground of ours, out from 
Noyon to Chaulny and Barisis and the floods of the Oise 
by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon Forest and Fran- 
ciily and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez by 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 493 

St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Harglcourt and Jean- 
court and La Verguier. It was a pleasant country, with 
living trees and green fields not annihilated by shell-fire, 
though with the naked eye I could see the scarred walls of 
St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages near the front- 
lines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead 
quiet there for miles, except for short bursts of harassing 
fire now and then, and odd shells here and there, and 
bursts of black shrapnel in the blue sky of mild days. 

"Paradise, after Flanders!" said our men, but I knew 
that there was a great movement of troops westward 
from Russia, and wondered how long this paradise would 
last. 

I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and 
did not see them, and wondered what our defense would 
be if the enemy attacked here in great strength. Our 
army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There were few 
men to be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was 
all strangely quiet. Alarmingly quiet. 

Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother 
commanding a battery along the railway line south of 
St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we had a picnic meal 
on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin cathe- 
dral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. 
The colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on 
his horse and called out, *'Fine morning, and a pretty 
spot!'* The infantry divisions were cheerful. "Like a 
rest-cure!" they said. They had sports almost within 
sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an 
Irish battalion, and while two fellows hammered each 
other I glanced away from them to winding, wavy lines 
of chalk on the opposite hillsides, and wondered what 
was happening behind them in that quietude. 

"What do you think about this German offensive?" 1 
asked the general of a London division (General Gorringe 
of the 47th) standing on a wagon and watching a tug-of- 
war. From that place also we could see the German 
positions. 



494 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

"G. H. Q. has got the wind-up," he said. "It is all 
bluff." 

General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Divi- 
sion, was of the same opinion, and took some pains to 
explain the folly of thinking the Germans would attack. 
Yet day after day, week after week, the Intelligence re- 
ports were full of evidence of immense movements of 
troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions 
in back areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, air- 
planes, battery positions. There was overwhelming evi- 
dence as to the enemy's intentions. Intelligence officers 
took me on one side and said : " England ought to know. 
The people ought to be prepared. All this is very serious. 
We shall be *up against it.'" G. H. Q. was convinced. 
On February 23d the war correspondents published articles 
summarizing the evidence, pointing out the gravity of the 
menace, and they were passed by the censorship. But 
England was not scared. Dances were in full swing in 
London. Little ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted. 
Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, 
though the hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed 
and shell-shocked. 

"I am skeptical of the German offensive " said Mr. 
Bonar Law. 

Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody 
ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth 
from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from 
deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and 
losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within 
our liberty of the pen. 

They were strange months for me. I felt that I was 
in possession, as indeed I was, of a terrible secret which 
might lead to the ending of the world — our world, as we 
knew it — with our liberties and power. For weeks I had 
been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word 
about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all 
day long. One laughed, but the specter echoed one's 
laughter and said, "Wait!" The mild sunshine of those 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 495 

spring days was pleasant to one*s spirit in the woods 
above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chat- 
tered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged Ger- 
man ** Archies.'* But the specter chilled one's blood at 
the reminder of vast masses of field-gray men drawing 
nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored 
to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes 
was a little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war — ■ 
D'Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. 
Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the 
journey's end one day he sang old French chansons, in 
an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He 
climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions, and 
made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said 
between them, "Ah, les sacres Boches! . . . If only I could 
fight again!" 

I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, 
in a little restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They 
had come from Paris with their parents to start this busi- 
ness, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O Lord!) And 
everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that 
night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs 
crashed. But the girls were brave. One of them volun- 
teered to go with an officer across the square to show him 
the way to the A. P. M., from where he had to get a pass 
to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the 
flagstones of the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. 
The officer wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out 
without any hat above her braided hair. We did not 
let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night 
I brought my brother to the place from his battery near 
St.-Quentin. We dined well, slept well. 

*' Noyon is a good spot," he said. "I shall come here 
again when you give me a lift." 

A few days later my brother was firing at masses of 
Germans with open sights, and the British army was in 
a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played 
his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of 



496 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells 
were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the 
glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have 
ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in 
the old hotel. 

So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even 
to the very date, and LudendorfF played his trump cards 
and the great game. 

Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, 
commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, 
showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main 
battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some 
words which froze my blood. 

"We may have to give ground," he said, "if the enemy 
attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our 
main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It 
is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our 
real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing Hke 
a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the 
Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy 
even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and 
we must not do that." 

*'The crossings of the Somme. . . . Amiens!" 

Such a thought had never entered my imagination. 
General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities. 

All but the worst happened. In my despatches, re- 
printed in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have 
told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British 
retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked 
by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell 
back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last 
brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and 
along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where after- 
ward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rup- 
precht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between 
Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up 
to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused 
us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 497 

gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of 
Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history 
again. 

They were evil days for us. The German offensive 
was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new 
method of "infiltration" which had been tried against 
Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at Capo- 
retto. 

It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of 
machine-gunners constantly reinforced and working in- 
ward so that our men, attacked frontally after terrific 
bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire on 
their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking 
advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited 
according to meteorological forecast, the Germans had 
easily made their way between our forward redoubts on 
the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a 
long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our 
inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they 
came in masses at a great pace with immense machine- 
gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army 
front where penetrations were made, notably near Bulle- 
court between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of 
our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with 
a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch 
with fighting units. Communications were broken down. 
Orders were given but not received. After enormous 
losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking 
the, roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time 
rather than for ground. The crossings of the Somme 
were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of 
those days some of our men, being human, were demoral- 
ized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might 
have been longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, 
there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who 
fought for days and nights without sleep; fought when 
they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and 
until few of them remained to hold any kind of fine. For- 



498 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

tunately the Germans were unable to drag their heavy 
guns over the desert they had made a year before in their 
own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened 
and they halted, in exhaustion. 

I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up 
by Guiscard and Hum; then, as the line moved back, by 
Peronne and Bapaume, and at last on a dreadful day by 
the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic fighting-ground, 
where once again after many battles the enemy was 
in Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, 
as I saw by going to the right through Albert, driving 
hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That meant the 
loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a 
chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was 
the absence of panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn 
of fortune's wheel by many officers and men, and the 
refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give way to de- 
spair in those days of tragedy and crisis. 

The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear 
and worse to see. The menace to the coast was frightful 
when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and captured Kem- 
mel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to 
relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. 
All through this country between Estaires and Merville, 
to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians 
had been living on the edge of the battlefields, believing 
themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had 
sHpped and they were caught by German shell-fire and 
German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to 
abandon their homes Hke the first fugitives. I saw old 
women coming down lanes where 5.9's were bursting and 
where our gunners were getting into action. I saw young 
mothers packing their babies and their bundles into per- 
ambulators while shells came hurtling over the thatched 
roofs of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats 
looking down upon a wide sweep of battle, and saw many 
little farmsteads on fire and Bailleul one torch of flame 
and smoke. 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 499 

There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats 
which had been in the midst of a cavalry battle in October 
of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse, the Kaiser's cousin, 
was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our troopers. 
He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched 
over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family 
and friends. Then his body was borne down the hill at 
night and buried secretly by a parish priest; and'when 
the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know the where- 
abouts of his cousin's grave, the priest to whom his mes- 
sage was conveyed said, "Tell the Kaiser he shall know 
when the German armies have departed from Belgium 
and when reparation has been made for all their evil 
deeds." It was the prior who told me that story and 
who described to me how the British cavalry had forged 
their way up the hill. He showed me the scars of bullets 
on the walls and the windows from which the monks 
looked out upon the battle. 

*'A11 that is a wonderful memory," said the prior. 
** Thanks to the English, we are safe and beyond the 
range of German shells." 

I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to 
see the sweep of battle beyond. The monastery was no 
longer beyond the range of German shells. An eight- 
inch shell had just smashed into the prior's parlor. Others 
had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks 
had fled by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the 
captain of a sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the 
tramp of army boots. The Ulster gunners had made 
their headquarters in the refectory, but did not stay there 
long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin. 

From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide 
of war our soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries 
or on gun-wagons. They did not weep, nor say much, 
but were wonderfully brave. I remember a little family 
in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began 
to fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little 
invalid brother in her arms, and a mother by her side, 



Soo NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

pointed the way to a cottage in a wood some miles away. 
She was gay and smiHng when she said, "Au revoir et 
merci!" A few days later the cottage and the wood were 
behind the German lines. 

The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st 
Highlanders (who had been all through the Somme re- 
treat), the 25th Division of Cheshires, Wiltshires and 
Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and 
others, who fought "with their backs to the wall," as Sir 
Douglas Haig demanded of them, without reliefs, until 
they were worn thin, was heroic and tragic in its ordeal, 
until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them riding in clouds 
of dust and heard the panting of their horses), followed by 
divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing 
up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind our 
thin brown line. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had 
twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve, but had to hold 
them until other plans were developed — the Crown 
Prince's plan against the French, and the attack on 
Arras. 

The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions — 
the Iron Division and the London Division on the left, 
and by the 15th Division and Guards on the right, saved 
the center of our line and all our line. We had a breath- 
ing-space while heavy blows fell against the French and 
against three British divisions who had been sent to hold 
*'a quiet sector" on their right. The Germans drove 
across the Chemin des Dames, struck right and left, ter- 
rific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne 
again, and threatened Paris. 

Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he 
waited until the last minute of safety, taking immense 
risks in order to be certain of his counter-stroke. For a 
time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he gathered them 
together again. As quick as the blue men had come up 
behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of 
our divisions went with them, the 51st Highlanders and 
15th Scottish, and the 48th Enghsh. The flower of the 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON' 501 

French army, the veterans of many battles, was massed 
behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American 
marines and infantry were given their first big job to do. 
What happened all the world knows. The Crown Prince's 
army was attacked on both flanks and in the center, and 
was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation. 



IX 

LudendorfF's great offensive had failed and had turned 
to ruin. Some of the twenty-six fresh divisions under 
Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into the melting-pot to 
save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its gaps 
filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young 
brothers of the elder brothers who had gone before, was 
ready to strike again, and on August 8th the Canadians 
and Australians north and south of the Somme, led by 
many tanks, broke the enemy's line beyond Amiens and 
slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous losses. 

For the first time in the war the cavalry had their 
chance of pursuit, and made full use of it, rounding up 
great batches of prisoners, capturing batteries of heavy 
and light guns, and fighting in many actions. 

"August 8th," writes Ludendorff, "was the black day 
of the German army in the history of this war." 

He describes from the German point of view what I 
and others have described from the British point of view, 
and the general narrative is the same — a succession of 
hammer-blows by the British armies, which broke not 
only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. 
It was a marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the 
Welsh waded at dusk across the foul waters of the River 
Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval, assembled under 
the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their 
skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength 
of the enemy, stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and 
hurled the enemy back from what he thought was an 
impregnable position, and followed him day by day. 



S02 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

taking thousands of prisoners and smashing his rear- 
guard defenses one by one. 

The most decisive battle of the British front in the 
"come-back," after our days of retreat, was when with the 
gallant help of American troops of the 27th New York 
Division our men of the English Midlands, the 46th 
Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line 
along the St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet 
wide, with steep cliffs rising sheer to a wonderful system 
of German machine-gun redoubts and tunneled defenses, 
between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis. It 
seemed to me an impossible place to assault and capture. 
If the enemy could not hold that line they could hold 
nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September 
30th, our men, with the Americans and Australians in 
support, went down to the canal-bank, waded across 
where the water was shallow, swam across in life-belts 
where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, 
under blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank 
bridges. A few hours after the beginning of the battle 
they were far out beyond the German side of the canal, 
with masses of prisoners in their hands. The Americans 
on the left of the attack, where the canal goes below 
ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they for- 
got, however, to "mop up" behind them, so that the 
enemy came out of his tunnels and the Australians had to 
cut their way through), and that evening I met their 
escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had 
helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy 
opposite the British front, and after that our troops 
fought through open country on the way to victory. 

I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and 
Le Cateau and afterward to the Rhine. Something of 
the horror of war passed when the enemy drew back 
slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we 
liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tour- 
coing, and scores of towns and villages where the people 
had been waiting for us so long, and now wept with joy 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 503 

to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetabie, when 
old men and women and girls and boys and little children 
crowded round us and kissed our hands. So it was in 
other places. Yet not all the horror had passed. In 
Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and 
other villages, the enemy's shell-lire and poison-gas killed 
and injured many of the people who had been under the 
German yoke so long and now thought they were safe. 
Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with 
gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying children. In 
Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there 
on its day of capture, so that when shells began to fall 
the people could not go down to shelter. Some of them 
did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old 
veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and with 
his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. 
He called out, *'Merci! Merci!" when English soldiers 
passed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands 
through the window and could not speak for the tears 
which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few 
dead Germans lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge 
on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead Ger- 
man of the war in that part of the line. He lay stretched 
outside the railway station into which many shells had 
crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own 
comrades toward our line before a bullet caught him. 

Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German 
troops, and of how his men surrendered to single troopers 
of ours, while whole detachments gave themselves up to 
tanks. "Retiring troops," he wrote, "greeted one par- 
ticular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and 
gallantly to the attack, with shouts of 'Blacklegs!' and 
'War-prolongers!'" That is true. When the Germans 
left Bohain they shouted out to the French girls: "The 
English are coming. Bravo! Thewarwill soon be over!" 
On a day in September, when British troops broke the 
Drocourt-Queant Hne, I saw the Second German Guards 
coming along in batches, like companies, and after they 



504 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed and 
clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming 
down as prisoners. I thought then, "Something has 
broken in the German spirit." For the first time the end 
seemed very near. 

Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many 
places, especially in the last battles round Cambrai, where, 
on the north, the Canadian corps had to fight desperately, 
and sufi'ered heavy and bitter losses under machine-gun 
fire, while on the south our naval division and others were 
badly cut up. 

General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was 
anxious and disheartened. He was losing more men in 
machine-gun actions round Cambrai than in bigger bat- 
tles. I watched those actions from Bourlon Wood, saw 
the last German railway train steam out of the town, 
and went into the city early on the morning of its capture, 
when there was a roaring fire in the heart of it and the 
Canadians were routing out the last Germans from their 
hiding-places. 

The British army could not have gone on much farther 
after November nth, when the armistice brought us to 
a halt. For three months our troops had fought inces- 
santly, storming many villages strongly garrisoned with 
machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire, 
and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace 
could not have been kept up. There is a limit even to 
the valor of British troops, and for a time we had reached 
that limit. There were not many divisions who could 
have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. 
But they had broken the German armies against them by 
a succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their rapid- 
ity and in their continuity, which I need not here describe 
in detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I 
have narrated that history as I was a witness of it day by 
day. 

Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their 
part with steady, driving pressure. The illimitable re- 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 505 

serves'of Americans, and their fighting quality, which 
triumphed over a faulty organization of transport and 
suppHes, left the German High Command without hope 
even for a final gamble. 

Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, 
against the bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and 
people. A blinding light had come to them, reveahng the 
criminality of their war lords in this "Great Swindle" 
against their race. It was defeat and agony which en- 
lightened them, as most people — even ourselves — are en- 
lightened only by suffering and disillusionment, and never 
by successes. 



After the armistice I went with our troops to the 
Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the 
most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years 
of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no 
wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with 
our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on 
the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at 
one's heart. What fools the Germans had been, what 
tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among 
rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to 
lead to this massacre! What had any one gained out of 
it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death 
and poverty and remorse and revolt. 

The German people received us humbly. They were 
eager to show us courtesy and submission. It was a 
chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in the 
hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty 
tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, 
bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few 
young staff-officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The 
officers of fighting battalions and the men were very 
different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch 
them. Here they were among the *'Huns." The men 
they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants 



So6 'NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a 
few days. They were "the enemy," the men they had 
tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They 
had actually fought against them in the same places. At 
the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a 
young waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had 
been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near 
Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched 
under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on 
the table-cloth. "I was just there." The three cavalry 
officers laughed. "Extraordinary! We were a few yards 
away." They chatted with the waiter as though he were 
an old acquaintance who had played against them in a 
famous football-match. They did not try to kill him 
with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup. 

That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, 
where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now 
expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the 
criminahty of his war lords, and things in general. Among 
these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for 
its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, 
rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with 
the head waiter, bullying him in a strident voice. 

"Some English gentlemen are swine," said the young 
waiter. "But all German gentlemen are swine." 

Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside 
Cologne or across the Rhine endeavored to stand on dis- 
tant terms with the "Huns." But it was impossible to 
be discourteous when the old lady of the house brought 
them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed 
their boots before the kitchen fire, said, "God be praised, 
the war is over." For English soldiers, anything like 
hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German boys 
and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, 
kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts. 

"Kids are kids," said a sergeant-major. "I don't want 
to cut their throats! Queer, ain't it?" 

Many of the "kids" looked half starved. Our men 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 507 

gave them bread and biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne 
the people seemed pleased to see British soldiers. There 
was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at this 
foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing — or a 
profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow 
and even a sense of protection against the revolutionary 
mob which had looted their houses before our entry? 
Almost every family had lost one son. Some of them 
two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They 
had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had 
been drowned in blood. 

In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once 
I heard them playing old English melodies, and I sickened 
a little at that. That was going too far! I looked round 
the Cafe Bauer — a strange scene after four and a half 
years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with 
Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans 
lifted their hats to English ''Tommies"; our men, Cana- 
dian and English, said "Cheerio!" to German soldiers in 
uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English 
people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the 
maintenance of the blockade, would have become hys- 
terical if they had come suddenly to this German cafe 
before the signing of peace. 

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been 
made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was 
human nature. Face to face, British soldiers found that 
every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite 
of being a *'Hun.'* As ecclesiastics would say when not 
roused to patriotic fury, they had been made "in the 
image of God." There were pleasant-spoken women in 
the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls with 
flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. 
They Vv^ere clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless 
even than English homes. When soldiers turned on a 
tap they found water came out of it. Wonderful! The 
sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were hard- 
working and dutiful. There was something, after all, in 



5o8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

German Kultur. At night the children said their prayers 
to the Christian God. Most of them were Cathohcs, and 
very pious. 

"They seem good people," said English soldiers. 

At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so 
good. Shameless women, though daintily dressed and 
comely. British soldiers — Enghsh, Scottish, and Cana- 
dian — grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered into 
converse with them, found they could all speak English, 
went down side-streets with them to narrow-fronted 
houses. There were squalid scenes when the A. P. M. 
raided these houses and broke up an entente cordiale that 
was flagrant and scandalous. 

Astonishing climax to the drama of war! No general 
orders could stop fraternization before peace was signed. 
Human nature asserted itself against all artificial restric- 
tions and false passion. Friends of mine who had been 
violent in their hatred of all Germans became thoughtful, 
and said: "Of course there are exceptions," and, "The 
innocent must not suffer for the guilty," and, "We can 
afford to be a little generous now." 

But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and 
we were not generous. We maintained the blockade, and 
German children starved, and German mothers weakened, 
and German girls swooned in the tram-cars, and German 
babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither 
did Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profi- 
teer. Down the streets of Cologne came people of the rich 
middle classes, who gorged themselves on buns and cakes 
for afternoon tea. They were cakes of ersatz flour with 
ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious, though 
very expensive. But in the side-streets, among the work- 
ing-women, there was, as I found, the wolf of hunger 
standing with open jaws by every doorway. It was not 
actual starvation, but what the Germans call unterndh- 
rung (under-nourishment), producing rickety children, con- 
sumptive girls, and men out of whom vitality had gone. 
They stinted and scraped on miserable substitutes, and 



THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON 509 

never had enough to eat. Yet they were the people who 
for two years at least had denounced the war, had sent up 
petitions for peace, and had written to their men in the 
trenches about the Great Swindle and the Gilded Ones. 
They were powerless, as some of them told me, because of 
the secret police and martial law. What could they do 
against the government, with all their men away at the 
front ? They were treated like pigs, like dirt. They could 
only suffer and pray. They had a httle hope that in the 
future, if France and England were not too hard, they 
might pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a 
new Germany arise out of its ruin, freed from militarism 
and with greater liberties. So humble people talked to 
us when I went among them with a friend who spoke 
good German, better than my elementary knowledge. 
I believed in their sincerity, which had come through 
suffering, though I believed that newspaper editors, many 
people in the official classes, and the old military caste 
were still implacable in hatred and unrepentant. 

The German people deserved punishment for their share 
in the guilt of war. They had been punished by frightful 
losses of life, by a multitude of cripples, by the ruin of 
their Empire. When they told me of their hunger I could 
not forget the hungry wives and children of France and 
Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind 
German lines, nor our prisoners who had been starved, 
until many of them died. When I walked through Ger- 
man villages and pitied the women who yearned for their 
men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year after the 
armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed 
us, I think), I remembered hundreds of French villages 
broken into dust by German gun-fire, burned by incen- 
diary shells, and that vast desert of the battlefields in 
France and Belgium which never in our time will regain 
its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans 
said, "Our industry is ruined," "Our trade is killed," I 
thought of the factories in Lille and many towns from 
Vv^hich all machinery had been taken or in which all 



Sio NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

machinery had been broken. I thought of the thousand 
crimes of their war, the agony of millions of people upon 
whose liberties they had trampled and upon whose necks 
they had imposed a brutal yoke. Yet even with all those 
memories of tragic scenes which in this book are but 
lightly sketched, I hoped that the peace we should impose 
would not be one of vengeance, by which the innocent 
would pay for the sins of the guilty, the children for their 
fathers' lust, the women for their war lords, the soldiers 
who hated war for those who drove them to the shambles; 
but that this peace should in justice and mercy lead the 
working-people of Europe out of the misery in which all 
were plunged, and by a poHcy no higher than common 
sense, but as high as that, establish a new phase of civil- 
ization in which military force would be reduced to the 
limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the 
folly of war and get back to work. 

I hoped too much. There was no such peace. 



Part Eight 

FOR WHAT 
MEN DIED 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 



IN this book I have written in a blunt way some epi- 
sodes of the war as I observed them, and gained first- 
hand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not 
painted the picture blacker than it was, nor selected 
gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a 
jig-saw puzzle for ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Bar- 
busse, who, in his dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unre- 
lieved blackness of this human drama, I have here and 
in other books shown the Hght as well as the shade in 
which our men Kved, the gaiety as well as the fear the}^ 
had, the exultation as well as the agony of battle, the 
spiritual ardor of boA's as well as the brutality of the task 
that was theirs. I have tried to set down as many 
aspects of the war's psychologj'' as I could find in my 
remembrance of these vears, without exaggeration or false 
emphasis, so that out of their confusion, even out of their 
contradiction, the real truth of the adventure might be 
seen as it touched the souls of men. 

Yet when one strives to sum up the e\ddence and reach 
definite conclusions about the motives which led men of 
the warring nations to kill one another year after year in 
those fields of slaughter, the ideals for which so many 
millions of men laid down their lives, and the effect of 
those years of carnage upon the philosophy of this present 
world of men, there is no clear line of thought or con- 
viction. 

It is difficult at least to forecast the changes that will 
be produced by this experience in the social structure of 
civilized peoples, and in their relations to one another, 



514 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

though it is certain, even now, that out of the passion of 
the war a new era in the world's history is being born. 
The ideas of vast masses of people have been revolution- 
ized by the thoughts that were stirred up in them during 
those years of intense suffering. No system of govern- 
ment designed by men afraid of the new ideas will have 
power to kill them, though they may throttle them for a 
time. For good or ill, I know not which, the ideas 
germinated in trenches and dugouts, in towns under shell- 
fire or bomb-fire, in hearts stricken by personal tragedy 
or world-agony, will prevail over the old order which 
dominated the nations of Europe, and the old philosophy 
of political and social governance will be challenged and 
perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are thwarted by 
reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to 
its old-fashioned discipline under their authority, there 
will be anarchy reaching to the heights of terror in more 
countries than those where anarchy now prevails. If by 
fear or by wisdom the new ideas are allowed to gain their 
ground gradually, a revolution will be accomplished with- 
out anarchy. But in any case, for good or ill, a revolu- 
tion will happen. It has happened in the sense that 
already there is no resemblance between this Europe 
after-the-war and that Europe-before-the-war, in the 
mental attitude of the masses toward the problems of life. 
In every country there are individuals, men and women, 
who are going about as though what had happened had 
made no difference, and as though, after a period of rest- 
lessness, the people will "settle down" to the old style of 
things. They are merely sleep-walkers. There are others 
who see clearly enough that they cannot govern or dupe 
the people with old spell-words, and they are struggling 
desperately to think out new words which may help them 
to regain their power over simple minds. The old gangs 
are organizing a new system of defense, building a new 
kind of Hindenburg line behind which they are dumping 
their political ammunition. But their Hindenburg hne 
is not impregnable. The angry murmur of the mob — 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 515^ 

highly organized, discipHned, passionate, trained to fight, 
is already approaching the outer bastions. 

In Russia the mob is in possession, wiping the blood 
out of their eyes after the nightmare of anarchy, encom- 
passed by forces of the old regime, and not knowing yet 
whether its victory is won or how to shape the new order 
that must follow chaos. 

In Germany there is only the psychology of stunned 
people, broken for a time in body and spirit, after stu- 
pendous efforts and bloody losses which led to ruin and 
the complete destruction of their old pride, philosophy, 
and power. The revolution that has happened there is 
strange and rather pitiful. It was not caused by the will- 
power of the people, but by a cessation of will-power. 
They did not overthrow their ruling dynasty, their 
tyrants. The tyrants fled, and the people were not angry, 
nor sorry, nor fierce, nor glad. They were stupefied. 
Members of the old order joined hands with those of the 
people's parties, out to evolve a republic with new ideals 
based upon the people's will and inspired by the people's 
passion. The Germans, after the armistice and after the 
peace, had no passion, as they had no will. They were 
in a state of coma. The "knock-out blow" had happened 
to them, and they were incapable of action. They just 
ceased from action. They had been betrayed to this ruin 
by their military and political rulers, but they had not 
vitality enough to demand vengeance on those men. The 
extent of their ruin was so great that it annihilated anger, 
political passion, pride, all emotion except that of despair. 
How could they save something out of the remnants of 
the power that had been theirs? How could they keep 
alive, feed their women and children, pay their monstrous 
debts? They had lost their faith as well as their war. 
Nothing that they had believed was true. They had 
believed in their invincible armies — and the armies had 
bled to death and broken. They had believed in the 
supreme miHtary genius of their war lords, and the war 
lords, blunderers as well as criminals, had led them to 



Si6 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

the abyss and dropped them over. They had believed 
in the divine mission of the German people as a civiHzing 
force, and now they were despised by all other peoples as 
a brutal and barbarous race, in spite of German music, 
German folk-songs, German art, German sentiment. They 
had been abandoned by God, by the protecting hand of 
the altes gutes Deutsches Gottes to whom many had prayed 
for comfort and help in those years of war, in Protestant 
churches and Catholic churches, with deep piety and 
childhke faith. What sins had they done that they 
should be abandoned by God? The invasion of Belgium? 
That, they argued, was a tragic necessity. Atrocities? 
Those were (they believed) the inventions of their enemies. 
There had been stern things done, terrible things, but 
according to the laws of war. Francs-tireurs had been 
shot. That was war. Hostages had been shot. It was 
to save German hves from slaughter by civihans. Indi- 
vidual brutalities, yes. There were brutes in all armies. 
The U-boat war? It was (said the German patriot) to 
break a blockade that was starving millions of German 
children to slow death, condemning millions to consump- 
tion, rickets, all manner of disease. Nurse Cavell? She 
pleaded guilty to a crime that was punishable, as she 
knew, by death. She was a brave woman who took her 
risk open-eyed, and was judged according to the justice 
of war, which is very cruel. Poison-gas ? Why not, said 
German soldiers, when to be gassed was less terrible than 
to be blown to bits by high explosives? They had been 
the first to use that new method of destruction, as the 
English were the first to use tanks, terrible also in their 
destructiveness. Germany was guilty of this war, had 
provoked it against peaceful peoples? No! A thousand 
times no. They had been, said the troubled soul of Ger- 
many, encompassed with enemies. They had plotted to 
close her in. Russia was a huge menace. France had 
entered into alliance with Russia, and was waiting her 
chance to grab at Alsace-Lorraine. Italy was ready for 
betrayal. England hated the power of Germany and 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 517 

was in secret alliance with France and Russia. Germany 
had struck to save herself. "It was a war of self-defense, 
to save the Fatherland." 

The German people still clung desperately to those 
ideas after the armistice, as I found in Cologne and other 
towns, and as friends of mine who had visited Berlin told 
me after peace was signed. The Germans refused to 
believe in accusations of atrocity. They knew that some 
of these stories had been faked by hostile propaganda, 
and, knowing that, as we know, they thought all were 
false. They said "Lies — lies — lies!" — ^and made counter^ 
charges against the Russians and Poles. They could not 
bring themselves to believe that their sons and brothers 
had been more brutal than the laws of war allow, and 
what brutality they had done was imposed upon them 
by ruthless discipline. But they deplored the war, and 
the common people, ex-soldiers and civilians, cursed the 
rich and governing classes who had made profit out of it, 
and had continued it when they might have made peace 
with honor. That was their accusation against their 
leaders — that and the ruthless, bloody way in which their 
men had been hurled into the furnace on a gambler's 
chance of victory, while they were duped by faked prom- 
ises of victory. 

When not put upon their defense by accusations against 
the whole Fatherland, the German people, as far as I 
could tell by talking with a few of them, and by those 
letters which fell into our hands, revolted in spirit against 
the monstrous futility and idiocy of the war, and were 
convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the greed 
and pride of the governing classes of all nations, who had 
used men's bodies as counters in a devil's game. That 
view was expressed in the signboards put above the 
parapet, "We're all fools: let's all go home"; and in 
that letter by the woman who wrote: 

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the 
gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything 
in front of our very eyes. . . . All soldiers — friend and 
34 



Si8 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

foe — ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, 
so that this war, which enslaves the people more than 
ever, may cease." 

It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may 
cause a more passionate revolution in Germany when the 
people awaken from their stupor. It was that view which 
led to the Russian Revolution and to Bolshevism. It is 
the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of British 
working-men and making them threaten to strike against 
any adventure of war, like that in Russia, which seems to 
them (unless proved otherwise) on behalf of the "gilded 
ones" and for the enslavement of the peoples. 

Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate con- 
victions of masses of men in Europe. That is one key 
to the heart of the revolutionary movement which is surg- 
ing beneath the surface of our European state. It is 
the behef of many brooding minds that almost as great 
as the direct guilt of the German war lords was the guilt 
of the whole political society of Europe, whose secret 
diplomacy (unrevealed to the peoples) was based upon 
hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for imperial power 
and the world's markets, as common folk play dominoes 
for penny points, and risking the lives of common folk in 
a gamble for enormous stakes of territory, imperial pres- 
tige, the personal vanity of politicians, the vast private 
gain of trusts and profiteers. To keep the living counters 
quiet, to make them jump into the pool of their own free 
will at the word "Go," the statesmen, diplomats, trusts, 
and profiteers debauch the name of patriotism, raise the 
watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of the 
mob easily, skilfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by 
inflaming the brute-passion in them, and by concocting 
a terrible mixture of false idealism and self-interest, so 
that simple minds quick to respond to sentiment, as well 
as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally shoulder 
to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the 
spell of that potion. Some go with a noble sense of sac- 
rifice, some with blood-lust in their hearts, most with the 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 519 

herd-instinct following the lead, little knowing that they 
are but the pawns of a game which is being played behind 
closed doors by the great gamblers in the courts and 
Foreign OjB&ces, and committee-rooms, and counting- 
houses, of the political casinos in Europe. 

I have heard the expression of this view from soldiers 
during the war and since the war, at street-corners, in 
tram-cars, and in conversations with railway men, 
mechanics, policemen, and others who were soldiers a 
year ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the mean- 
ing of the war. I am certain that millions of men are 
thinking these things, because I found the track of those 
common thoughts, crude, simple, dangerous, among 
Canadian soldiers crossing the Atlantic, in Canadian 
towns, and in the United States, as I had begun to see the 
trail of them far back in the early days of the war when I 
moved among French soldiers, Belgian soldiers, and our 
own men. 

My own belief is not so simple as that. I do not 
divorce all peoples from their governments as victims of 
a subtle tyranny devised by statesmen and diplomats of 
diabolical cunning, and by financial magnates ready to 
exploit human life for greater gains. I see the evil which 
led to the crime of the war and to the crimes of the peace 
with deep-spread roots to the very foundation of human 
society. The fear of statesmen, upon which all inter- 
national relations were based, was in the hearts of peoples. 
France was afraid of Germany and screwed up her mili- 
tary service, her war preparations, to the limit of national 
endurance, the majority of the people of France accept- 
ing the burden as inevitable and right. Because of her 
fear of Germany France made her alliance with Russian 
Czardom, her entente cordiale with Imperial England, and 
the French people poured their money into Russian loans 
as a life insurance against the German menace. French 
statesmen knew that their diplomacy was supported by 
the majority of the people by their ignorance as well as 
by their knowledge. 



520 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

So it was In Germany. The spell-words of the German 
war lords expressed the popular sentiment of the German 
people, which was largely influenced by the fear of Russia 
in alliance with France, by fear and envy of the British 
Empire and England's sea-power, and by the faith that 
Germany must break through that hostile combination, 
at all costs in order to fulfil the high destiny which was 
marked out for her, as she thought, by the genius and 
industry of her people. The greed of the "bloated aris- 
tocrats" was only on a bigger scale than the greed of the 
small shopkeepers. The desire to capture new markets 
belonged not only to statesmen, but to commercial trav- 
elers. The German peasant believed as much in the 
might of the German armies as Hindenburg and Luden- 
dorflF. The brutality of German generals was not worse 
than that of the Unteroffizier or the foreman of works. 

In England there was no traditional hatred of Germany, 
but for some years distrust and suspicions, which had been 
vented in the newspapers, with taunts and challenges, 
stinging the pride of Germans and playing into the hands 
of the Junker caste. 

Our war psychology was different from that of our 
allies because of our island position and our faith in sea- 
power which had made us immune from the fear of in- 
vasion. It took some time to awaken the people to a 
sense of real peril and of personal menace to their hearths 
and homes. To the very end masses of English folk be- 
lieved that we were fighting for the rescue of other peoples 
— Belgian, French, Serbian, Rumanian — and not for the 
continuance of our imperial power. 

The official propaganda, the words and actions of Brit- 
ish statesmen, did actually express the conscious and sub- 
conscious psychology of the multitude. The call to the 
old watchwords of national pride and imperial might 
thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in sea- 
battles and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of "the 
little nations" struck old chords of chivalry and senti- 
ment — though with a strange lack of logic and sincerity 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 521 

Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base 
passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. 
Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. 
The more revolting they were the quicker they were 
swallowed. The foul absurdity of the "corpse-factory" 
was not rejected any more than the tale of the "crucified 
Canadian" (disproved by our own G. H. Q.) or the cutting 
off of children's hands and women's breasts, for which I 
could find no evidence from the only British ambulances 
working in the districts where such horrors were reported. 
Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was 
banned in English drawing-rooms. Preachers and pro- 
fessors denied any quality of virtue or genius to German 
poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical 
weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and 
lack of patriotism. Truth was delivered bound to pas- 
sion. Hatred at home, inspired largely by feminine hys- 
teria and official propaganda, reached such heights that 
when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal to 
say much against their enemy, their straightforward asser- 
tions that Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that 
he fought bravely, died gamely, and in the prison-camps 
was well-mannered, decent, industrious, good-natured, 
were heard with shocked silence by mothers and sisters 
who could only excuse this absence of hate on the score 
of war-weariness. 

II 

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the 
general blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no pas- 
sionate appeal in the name of Christ or in the name of 
humanity for the cessation of the slaughter of boys and 
the suicide of nations and for a reconciliation of peoples 
upon terms of some more reasonable argument than that 
of high explosives. Peace proposals from the Pope, from 
Germany, from Austria, were rejected with fierce denun- 
ciation, most passionate scorn, as "peace plots" and 
"peace traps," not without the terrible logic of the vicious 



522 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

circle, because, indeed, there was no sincerity of renuncia- 
tion in some of those offers of peace, and the powers 
hostile to us were simply trying our strength and our 
weakness in order to make their own kind of peace which 
should be that of conquest. The gamblers, playing the 
game of "poker,'* with crowns and armies as their stakes, 
were upheld generally by the peoples, who would not 
abate one point of pride, one fraction of hate, one claim 
of vengeance, though all Europe should fall in ruin and 
the last legions of boys be massacred. There was no call 
from people to people across the frontiers of hostility: 
"Let us end this homicidal m_ania! Let us get back to 
sanity and save our younger sons. Let us hand over to 
justice those who will continue the slaughter of our 
youth!" There was no forgiveness, no generous instinct, 
no large-hearted common sense in any combatant nation 
of Europe. Like wolves they had their teeth in one 
another's throats, and would not let go, though all bloody 
and exhausted, until one should fall at the last gasp, to be 
mangled by the others. Yet in each nation, even in Ger- 
many, there were men and women who saw the folly of 
the war and the crime of it, and desired to end it by some 
act of renunciation and repentance, and by some uplifting 
of the people's spirit to vault the frontiers of hatred and 
the barbed wire which hedged in patriotism. Some of 
them were put in prison. Most of them saw the impos- 
sibility of counteracting the forces of insanity which had 
made the world mad, and kept silent, hiding their thoughts 
and brooding over them. The leaders of the nations con- 
tinued to use mob-passion as their argument and justifi- 
cation, excited it anew when its fires burned low, focused 
it upon definite objectives, and gave it a sense of righteous- 
ness by the high-sounding watchwords of liberty, justice, 
honor, and retribution. Each side proclaimed Christ as 
its captain and invoked the blessing and aid of the God 
of Christendom, though Germans were allied with Turks 
and France was full of black and yellow men. The Ger- 
man people did not try to avert their ruin by denouncing 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 523 

the criminal acts of their war lords nor by deploring the 
cruelties they had committed. The Allies did not help 
them to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance 
and their desire for the spoils of victory. The peoples 
shared the blame of their rulers because they were not 
nobler than their rulers. They cannot now plead igno- 
rance or betrayal by false ideals which duped them, be- 
cause character does not depend on knowledge, and it 
was the character of European peoples which failed in the 
crisis of the world's fate, so that they followed the call- 
back of the beast in the jungle rather than the voice of 
the Crucified One whom they pretended to adore. 



Ill 

The character of European peoples failed in common 
sense and in Christian charity. It did not fail in courage 
to endure great agonies, to suffer death largely, to be 
obedient to the old tradition of patriotism and to the 
stoic spirit of old fighting races. 

In courage I do not think there was much difference 
between the chief combatants. The Germans, as a race, 
were wonderfully brave until their spirit was broken by 
the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food. Many 
times through all those years they marched shoulder to 
shoulder, obedient to discipline, to certain death, as I 
saw them on the Somme, like martyrs. They marched 
for their Fatherland, inspired by the spirit of the German 
race, as it had entered their souls by the memory of old 
German songs, old heroic ballads, their German home 
life, their German women, their love of little old towns 
on hillsides or in valleys, by all the meaning to them of 
that word Germany, which is like the name of England 
to us — who is fool enough to think otherwise ? — and fought 
often, a thousand times, to the death, as I saw their 
bodies heaped in the fields of the Somme and round their 
pill-boxes in Flanders and in the last phase of the war 
behind the Hindenburg line round their broken batteries 



524 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

on the way of Mons and Le Cateau. The German people 
endured years of semi-starvation and a drain of blood 
greater than any other fighting people — two million dead 
— before they lost all vitality, hope, and pride and made 
their abject surrender. At the beginning they were out 
for conquest, inspired by arrogance and pride. Before 
the end they fought desperately to defend the Fatherland 
from the doom which cast its black shadow on them as 
it drew near. They were brave, those Germans, what- 
ever the brutahty of individual men and the cold-blooded 
cruelty of their commanders. 

The courage of France is to me like an old heroic song, 
stirring the heart. It was medieval in its complete ad- 
herence to the faith of valor and its spirit of sacrifice for 
La Patrie. If patriotism were enough as the gospel of 
life — Nurse Cavell did not think so — France as a nation 
was perfect in that faith. Her people had no doubt as to 
their duty. It was to defend their sacred soil from 
the enemy which had invaded it. It was to hurl the 
brutes back from the fair fields they had ravaged and 
despoiled. It was to liberate their brothers and sisters 
from the outrageous tyranny of the German yoke in the 
captured country. It was to seek vengeance for bloody, 
foul, and abominable deeds. 

In the first days of the war France was struck by heavy 
blows which sent her armies reeling back in retreat, but 
before the first battle of the Marne, when her peril was 
greatest, when Paris seemed doomed, the spirit of the 
French soldiers rose to a supreme act of faith — which was 
fulfilled when Foch attacked in the center, when Manoury 
struck on the enemy's flank and hundreds of thousands of 
young Frenchmen hurled themselves, reckless of life, upon 
the monster which faltered and then fled behind the shel- 
ter of the Aisne. With bloodshot eyes and parched throats 
and swollen tongues, blind with sweat and blood, mad 
with the heat and fury of attack, the French soldiers 
fought through that first battle of the Marne and saved 
France from defeat and despair. 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 525 

After that, year after year, they flung themselves against 
the German defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, 
as at Verdun, against colossal onslaught, until the dead 
lay in masses. But the living said, "They shall not 
pass!" and kept their word. 

The people of France — above all, the women of France 
— behind the lines, were the equals of the fighting-men in 
valor. They fought with despair, through many black 
months, and did not yield. They did the work of their 
men in the fields, and knew that many of them — the sons 
or brothers or lovers or husbands — would never return 
for the harvest-time, but did not cry to have them back 
until the enemy should be thrust out of France. Behind 
the German line, under German rule, the French people, 
prisoners in their own land, suffered most in spirit, but 
were proud and patient in endurance. 

*'Why don't your people give in?'* asked a German 
officer of a woman in Nesle. *' France is bleeding to 
death." 

"We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, 
or five, and in the end we shall smash you," said the 
woman who told me this. 

The German officer stared at her and said, "You people 
are wonderful!" 

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred 
of the Germans, their desire for vengeance, complete and 
terrible, at all cost of life, even though France should 
bleed to death and die after victory, is to be understood 
in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the passion 
of its love for France and liberty. When I think of 
France I am tempted to see no greater thing than such 
patriotism as that to justify the gospel of hate against 
such an enemy, to uphold vengeance as a sweet virtue. 
Yet if I did so I should deny the truth that has been re- 
vealed to many men and women by the agony of the war 
— that if civilization may continue patriotism is "not 
enough," that international hatred will produce other 
wars worse than this, in which civihzation will be sub- 



526 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

merged, and that vengeance, even for dreadful crimes, 
cannot be taken of a nation without punishing the inno- 
cent more than the guilty, so that out of its cruelty and 
injustice new fires of hatred are lighted, the demand for 
vengeance passes to the other side, and the devil finds 
another vicious circle in which to trap the souls of men 
and "catch 'em all alive O!" 

To deny that would also be a denial of the faith with 
which millions of young Frenchmen rushed to the colors 
in the first days of the war. It was they who said, "This 
is a war to end war." They told me so. It was they who 
said: "German militarism must be killed so that all 
militarism shall be abolished. This is a war for liberty." 
So soldiers of France spoke to me on a night when Paris 
was mobilized and the tragedy began. It is a Frenchman 
— Henri Barbusse — who, in spite of the German invasion, 
the outrages against his people, the agony of France, has 
the courage to say that all peoples in Europe were involved 
in the guilt of that war because of their adherence to that 
old barbaric creed of brute force and the superstitious 
servitude of their souls to symbols of national pride based 
upon military tradition. He even denounces the salute 
to the flag, instinctive and sacred in the heart of every 
Frenchman, as a fetish worship in which the narrow 
bigotry of national arrogance is raised above the rights 
of the common masses of men. He draws no distinction 
between a war of defense and a war of aggression, because 
attack is the best means of defense, and all peoples who 
go to war dupe themselves into the belief that they do 
so in defense of their liberties, and rights, and power, and 
property. Germany attacked France first because she 
was ready first and sure of her strength. France would 
have attacked Germany first to get back Alsace-Lorraine, 
to wipe out 1870, if she also had been ready and sure of 
her strength. The political philosophy on both sides of 
the Rhine was the same. It was based on military power 
and rivalry of secret alliances and imperial ambitions. 
The large-hearted internationalism of Jean Jaures, who 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 527 

with all his limitations was a great Frenchman, patriot, 
and idealist, had failed among his own people and in 
Germany, and the assassin's bullet was his reward for the 
adventure of his soul to lift civilization above the level of 
the old jungle law and to save France from the massacre 
which happened. 

In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, 
most splendid in valor. In her dictated peace, which 
was ours also, her leaders were betrayed by the very evil 
which millions of young Frenchmen had gone out to kill 
at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was exalted 
in France above the ruins of German militarism. It was 
a peace of vengeance which punished the innocent more 
than the guilty, the babe at the breast more than the 
Junker in his Schloss, the poor working-woman more than 
the war lord, the peasant who had been driven to the 
shambles more than Sixt von Arnim or Rupprecht of 
Bavaria, or Ludendorfi^, or Hindenburg. It is a peace 
that can only be maintained by the power of artillery 
and by the conscription of every French boy who shall 
be trained for the next "war of defense" (twenty years 
hence, thirty years hence), when Germany is strong again 
— stronger than France because of her population, stronger 
then, enormously, than France, in relative numbers of 
able-bodied men than in August, 1914. So if that phi- 
losophy continue — and I do not think it will — the old fear 
will be re-established, the old burdens of armament will 
be piled up anew, the people of France will be weighed 
down as before under a military regime stifling their 
liberty of thought and action, wasting the best years of 
their boyhood in barracks, seeking protective alliances, 
buying allies at great cost, establishing the old spy- 
system, the old diplomacy, the old squalid ways of inter- 
national politics, based as before on fear and force. Mar- 
shal Foch was a fine soldier. Clemenceau was a strong 
Minister of War. There was no man great enough in 
France to see beyond the passing triumph of military 
victory and by supreme generosity of soul to lift their 



528 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

enemy out of the dirt of their despair, so that the new 
German Republic should arise from the ruins of the 
Empire, remorseful of their deeds in France and Belgium, 
with all their rage directed against their ancient tyranny, 
and with a new-born spirit of democratic liberty reaching 
across the old frontiers. 

Is that the fooHsh dream of the sentimentalist? No, 
more than that; for the German people, after their agony, 
were ready to respond to generous dealing, pitiful in their 
need of it, and there is enough sentiment in German hearts 
— the most sentimental people in Europe — to rise with a 
surge of emotion to a new gospel of atonement if their 
old enemies had offered a chance of grace. France has 
not won the war by her terms of peace nor safeguarded 
her frontiers for more than a few uncertain years. By 
harking back to the old philosophy of militarism she has 
re-established peril amid a people drained of blood and 
deeply in debt. Her support of reactionary forces in 
Russia is to establish a government which will guarantee 
the interest on French loans and organize a new military 
regime in alliance with France and England. Meanwhile 
France looks to the United States and British people to 
protect her from the next war, when Germany shall be 
strong again. She is playing the militarist role without 
the strength to sustain it. 

IV 

What of England? . . . Looking back at the immense 
effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of 
sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of 
our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed, ac- 
knowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called 
out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. 
The traditions of a thousand years of history filled with 
war and travail and adventure, by which old fighting 
races had blended with different strains of blood and 
temper — Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman — sur- 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 529 

vived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or 
city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of slum- 
dom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship, and 
sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The 
Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in 
attack and defense. The South Country battalions of 
Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not 
behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost 
their fire and passion, but were terrible in their onslaught. 
The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut oflF at the base, 
fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to 
answer the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled 
Mametz Wood, devoured the "Cockchafers" on Pilkem 
Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the Black Eagle in 
the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had 
all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a 
harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened 
ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here 
and there among officers and men, the stock was true and 
strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt 
in its blood from Land's End to John o' Groat's and back 
again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered 
the ruffle of Drake's drum and, with simplicity and 
gravity in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the 
highways of the seas, hunted worse monsters than any 
fabulous creatures of the deep, and shirked no dread ad- 
venture in the storms and darkness of a spacious hell. 
The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of 
those who fought the Spanish Armada and singed the 
King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz harbor. The victors of 
the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's (the 
scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press- 
gang) and not less brave in frightful hours. Without the 
service of the British seamen the war would have been 
lost for France and Italy and Belgium, and all of us. 

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flan- 
ders, to Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and 
Saloniki, and it was a fine flower of gallant boyhood. 



530 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

clean, for the most part eager, not brutal except by in- 
tensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous 
in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, 
and dutiful. That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, 
criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battal- 
ions, as in all crowds of men. 

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded 
the bravery of our troops on the western front, their 
patience, their cheerfulness, suffering, and agony; yet 
with all those words describing day by day the incidents 
of their Hfe in war I did not exaggerate the splendor of 
their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The 
heroes of mythology were but paltry figures compared 
with those who, in the great war, went forward to the 
roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid high ex- 
plosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the 
fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, 
watched and slept above mine-craters which upheaved 
the hell-fire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more cer- 
tain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove. 

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led 
them to endure these things without revolt — ideals higher 
than the selfish motives of life. They did not fight for 
greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for vengeance. 
Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for 
I am certain that except in hours when men "see red" 
there was no direct hatred of the men in the opposite 
trenches, but, on the other hand, a queer sense of fellow- 
feeling, a humorous sympathy for "old Fritz," who was 
in the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it 
is true, hated the Germans. *'I should like one week in 
Cologne," one of them told me, before there seemed ever 
a chance of getting there, "and I would let my men loose 
in the streets and turn a blind eye to anything they liked 
to do." 

Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelent- 
ing hate. 

"If I had a thousand Germans in a row," one of them 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 531 

said to me, "I would cut all their throats, and enjoy the 
job/' 

But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, 
except those who were murderers by nature and pleasure. 
They gave their cigarettes to prisoners and filled their 
water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way with any 
German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them 
time and time again on days of battle, in the fields of 
battle. There were exceptions to this treatment, but 
even the Australians and the Scots, who were most fierce 
in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated their pris- 
oners with humanity when they were bundled back. 
Hatred was not the motive which made our men endure 
all things. It was rather, as I have said, a refusal in their 
souls to be beaten in manhood by all the devils of war, by 
all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at the back of all 
the thought that the old country was "up against it" and 
that they were there to avert the evil. 

Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of 
*' other ranks," as they were called, were inspired at the 
beginning, and some of them to the end, with a simple, 
boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war than 
German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster 
who had to be destroyed lest the world and its beauty 
should perish — and that was true so long as the individual 
German, who loathed the war, obeyed the discipline of 
the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural 
laws which, when the war had once started, bade him die 
in defense of his own Fatherland. Many of those boys 
of ours made a dedication of their lives upon the altar of 
sacrifice, believing that by this service and this sacrifice 
they would help the victory of civilization over barbarism, 
and of Christian morality over the devil's law. They 
believed that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, 
to insure the happiness and liberties of civilized peoples, 
and were sure of the gratitude of their nation should they 
not have the fate to fall upon the field of honor, but go 
home blind or helpless. 



532 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

I have read many letters from Doys now dead in which 
they express that faith. 

"Do not grieve for me," wrote one of them, "for I shall 
be proud to die for my country's sake." 

"I am happy," wrote another (I quote the tenor of his 
letters), "because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the 
war to end war. We are the last victims of this way of 
argument. By smashing the German war-machine we 
shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism 
and Junkerdom." 

There were young idealists like that, and they were to 
be envied for their faith, which they brought with them 
from public schools and from humble homes where they 
had read old books and heard old watchwords. I think, 
at the beginning of the war there were many like that. 
But as it continued year after year doubts crept in, dread- 
ful suspicions of truth more complex than the old sim- 
plicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally shared 
and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which 
they had been called to fight. 

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. 
But their first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty 
under a discipline which made the private soldier no more 
than a number. They were ordered about like galley- 
slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and 
in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and 
well-being. Often, as I know, they were detrained at 
rail-heads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of 
staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were 
weak and famished. In the base camps men of one bat- 
talion were drafted into other battalions, where they lost 
their old comrades and were unfamiliar with the speech 
and habits of a crowd belonging to different counties, the 
Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the York- 
shire men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R. T. O.'s 
and A. M. L. O.'s and camp commandments and town 
majors and staff" pups men were bullied and bundled 
about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 533 

in a thousand ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, 
degrading punishments for trivial offenses, struck at their 
souls and made the name of personal liberty a mockery. 
From their own individuality they argued to broader 
issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the masses of 
men on either side fighting with free will as free men? 
Those Germans — ^were they not under discipline, each 
man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not ? 
Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns 
behind them to shoot them down if they revolted against 
their slave-drivers? What liberty had they to follow 
their conscience or their judgment — "Theirs not to reason 
why, theirs but to do and die" — like all soldiers in all 
armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men en- 
gaged in slaughter were serving the purpose of powers 
above them, rival powers, greedy for one another's markets, 
covetous of one another's wealth, and callous of the lives 
of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring 
nations were put together for even a week in some such 
place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by 
the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, 
rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty 
of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would 
settle the business and come to terms before the week was 
out. I heard that proposition put forward many times 
by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their 
own sacrifice they found it unanswerable. 



The condition and psychology of their own country as 
they read about it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first 
to come into their billets, filled some of these young men 
with distress and disgust, strengthened into rage when 
they went home on leave. The deHberate falsification of 
news (the truth of which they heard from private chan- 
nels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our 
case and state. They said, "Propaganda!" with a sharp 



534 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public men, 
preachers, and journaHsts, never downcast by black news, 
never agonized by the slaughter in these fields, mini- 
mizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the 
enemy, prophesying early victory which did not come, 
accepting all the destruction of manhood (while they 
stayed safe) as a necessary and inevitable "misfortune," 
had a depressing effect on men who knew they were 
doomed to die, in the law of averages, if the war went on. 
"Damn their optimism!" said some of our ojfficers. "It's 
too easy for those behind the lines. It is only we who have 
the right of optimism. It's we who have to do the dirty 
work! They seem to think we Hke the job! What are 
they doing to bring the end nearer?'* 

The frightful suspicion entered the heads of some of 
our men (some of those I knew) that at home people liked 
the war and were not anxious to end it, and did not care 
a jot for the sufferings of the soldiers. Many of them 
came back from seven days' leave fuming and sullen. 
Everybody was having a good time. Munition-workers 
were earning wonderful wages and spending them on 
gramophones, pianos, furs, and the "pictures." Every- 
body was gadding about in a state of joyous exultation. 
The painted flapper was making herself sick with the 
sweets of life after office hours in government employ, 
where she did little work for a lot of pocket-money. The 
society girl was dancing bare-legged for "war charities," 
pushing into bazaars for the "poor, dear wounded," get- 
ting her pictures into the papers as a "notable war- 
worker," married for the third time in three years; the 
middle-class cousin was driving staff-officers to White- 
hall, young gentlemen of the Air Service to Hendon, 
junior secretaries to their luncheon. Millions of girls 
were in some kind of fancy dress with buttons and shoul- 
der-straps, breeches and puttees, and they seemed to be 
making a game of the war and enjoying it thoroughly. 
Oxford dons were harvesting, and proud of their prowess 
with the pitchfork — behold their patriotism! — while the 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 535 

boys were being blown to bits on the Yser Canal. Miners 
were striking for more wages, factory hands were downing 
tools for fewer hours at higher pay, the government was 
paying any price for any labor — ^while Tommy Atkins 
drew his one-and-twopence and made a little go a long 
way in a wayside estaminet before jogging up the Menin 
road to have his head blown off. The government had 
created a world of parasites and placemen housed in 
enormous hotels, where they were engaged at large sal- 
aries upon mysterious unproductive labors which seemed 
to have no result in front-line trenches. Government 
contractors were growing fat on the life of war, amassing 
vast fortunes, juggling with excess profits, battening upon 
the flesh and blood of boyhood in the fighting-lines. 
These old men, these fat men, were breathing out fire 
and fury against the Hun, and vowing by all their gods 
that they would see their last son die in the last ditch 
rather than agree to any peace except that of destruction. 
There were *'fug committees" (it was Lord Kitchener's 
word) at the War Ofl&ce, the Board of Trade, the Foreign 
Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the 
Ministry of Information, where officials on enormous 
salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and decided how 
to spend vast sums of public money on *' organization" 
which made no difference to the man stifling his cough 
below the parapet in a wet fog of Flanders, staring across 
No Man's Land for the beginning of a German attack. 

In all classes of people there was an epidemic of danc- 
ing, jazzing, card-playing, theater-going. They were keep- 
ing their spirits up wonderfully. Too well for men 
slouching about the streets of London on leave, and won- 
dering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the things 
they had seen and forward to the things they would have 
to do. People at home, it seemed, were not much inter- 
ested in the life of the trenches; anyhow, they could not 
understand. The soldier listened to excited tales of air 
raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The win- 
dows had been broken. Many people had been killed in 



536 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

a house somewhere in Hackney. It was frightful. The 
Germans were devils. They ought to be torn to pieces, 
every one of them. The soldier on leave saw crowds of 
people taking shelter in underground railways, working- 
men among them, sturdy lads, panic-stricken. But for 
his own wife and children he had an evil sense of satis- 
faction in these sights. It would do them good. They 
would know what war meant — ^just a little. They would 
not be so easy in their damned optimism. An air raid? 
Lord God, did they know what a German barrage was 
like? Did they guess how men walked day after day 
through harassing fire to the trenches? Did they have 
any faint idea of Hfe in a sector where men stood, slept, 
ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point- 
nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bul- 
lets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire 
on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight 
night air raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded 
into a small space that hardly a bomb could fall without 
killing a group of men. 

"Oh, but you have your dugouts!" said a careless little 
lady. 

The soldier smiled. 

It was no use talking. The people did not want to 
hear the tragic side of things. Bairnsfather's "Ole Bill" 
seemed to them to typify the spirit of the fighting-man. 
..."'Alfamo', Kaiser!"... 

The British soldier was gay and careless of death — 
always. Shell-fire meant nothing to him. If he were 
killed-well, after all, what else could he expect ? Wasn't 
that what he was out for? The twice-married girl knew 
a charming boy in the air force. He had made love to 
her even before Charlie was "done in." These dear boys 
were so greedy for love. She could not refuse them, poor 
darlings! Of course they had all got to die for liberty, 
and that sort of thing. It was very sad. A terrible thing 
— ^war! . . . Perhaps she had better give up dancing for a 
week, until Charlie had been put into the casualty Hsts. 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 537 

"What are we fighting for?" asked officers back from 
leave, turning over the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, 
with pictures of race-meetings, strike-meetings, bare- 
backed beauties at war bazaars, and portraits of profiteers 
in the latest honors hst. "Are we going to die for these 
swine? These parasites and prostitutes? Is this the war 
for noble ideals, hberty, Christianity, and civilization? 
To hell with all this filth ! The world has gone mad and 
we are the victims of insanity." 

Some of them said that below all that froth there were 
deep and quiet waters in England. They thought of the 
anguish of their own wives and mothers, their noble 
patience, their uncomplaining courage, their spiritual 
faith in the purpose of the war. Perhaps at the heart 
England was true and clean and pitiful. Perhaps, after 
all, many people at home were suffering more than the 
fighting-men, in agony of spirit. It was unwise to let 
bitterness poison their brains. Anyhow, they had to go 
on. How long, how long, O Lord? 

"How long is it going to last?" asked the London 
Rangers of their chaplain. He lied to them and said 
another three months. Always he had absolute knowl- 
edge that the war would end three months later. That 
was certain. "Courage!" he said. "Courage to the end 
of the last lap!" 

Most of the long-service men were dead and gone long 
before the last lap came. It was only the new boys who 
went as far as victory. He asked permission of the gen- 
eral to withdraw nineteen of them from the line to in- 
struct them for Communion. They were among the 
best soldiers, and not afraid of the ridicule of their fellows 
because of their religious zeal. The chaplain's main 
purpose was to save their lives, for a while, and give them 
a good time and spiritual comfort. They had their good 
time. Three weeks later came the German attack on 
Arras and they were all killed. Every man of them. 

The chaplain, an Anglican, found it hard to reconcile 
Christianity with such a war as this, but he did not camou- 



538 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

flage the teachings of the Master he tried to serve. He 
preached to his men the gospel of love and forgiveness of 
enemies. It was reported to the general, who sent for 
him. 

"Look here, I can't let you go preaching 'soft stuff* 
to my men. I can't allow all that nonsense about love. 
My job is to teach them to hate. You must either co- 
operate with me or go." 

The chaplain refused to change his faith or his teaching, 
and the general thought better of his intervention. 

For all chaplains it was difficult. Simple souls were 
bewildered by the conflict between the spirit of Chris- 
tianity and the spirit of war. Many of them — officers as 
well as men — were blasphemous in their scorn of "parson 
stuff," some of them frightfully ironical. 

A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. 
One of them was a tall man with a crown and star on his 
shoulder-strap. 

"I wonder," said my friend, with false simplicity, 
"whether Jesus Christ would have been a lieutenant- 
colonel?" 

On the other hand, many men found help in religion, 
and sought its comfort with a spiritual craving. They 
did not argue about Christian ethics and modern warfare. 
Close to death in the midst of tragedy, conscious in a 
strange way of their own spiritual being and of a spirit- 
uality present among masses of men above the muck of 
war, the stench of corruption, and fear of bodily extinc- 
tion, they groped out toward God. They searched for 
some divine wisdom greater than the folly of the world, 
for a divine aid which would help them to greater courage. 
The spirit of God seemed to come to them across No 
Man's Land with pity and comradeship. Catholic sol- 
diers had a simpler, stronger faith than men of Protestant 
denominations, whose faith depended more on ethical 
arguments and intellectual reasonings. Catholic chap- 
lains had an easier task. Leaving aside all argument, 
they heard the confessions of the soldiers, gave them 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 539 

absolution for their sins, said mass for them in wayside 
barns, administered the sacraments, held the cross to 
their lips when they fell mortally wounded, anointed them 
when the surgeon's knife was at work, called the names 
of Jesus and Mary into dying ears. There was no need 
of argument here. The old faith which has survived 
many wars, many plagues, and the old wickedness of 
men was still full of consolation to those who accepted 
it as little children, and by their own agony hoped for 
favor from the Man of Sorrows who was hanged upon a 
cross, and found a mother-love in the vision of Mary, 
which came to them when they were in fear and pain 
and the struggle of death. The padre had a definite job 
to do in the trenches and for that reason was allowed 
more liberty in the line than other chaplains. Battalion 
officers, surgeons, and nurses were patient with mysteri- 
ous rites which they did not understand, but which gave 
comfort, as they saw, to wounded men; and the heroism 
with which many of those priests worked under fire, care- 
less of their own lives, exalted by spiritual fervor, yet for 
the most part human and humble and large-hearted and 
tolerant, aroused a general admiration throughout the 
army. Many of the Protestant clergy were equally de- 
voted, but they were handicapped by having to rely 
more upon providing physical comforts for the men than 
upon spiritual acts, such as anointing and absolution, which 
were accepted without question by Catholic soldiers. 

Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all 
other churches claiming that they teach the gospel of 
Christ, have been challenged to explain their attitude 
during the war and the relation of their teaching to the 
world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. 
It will not be easy for them to do so. They will have to 
explain how it is that German bishops, priests, pastors, 
and flocks, undoubtedly sincere in their professions of 
faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers saw in Cologne, and 
fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on their side 
of the fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side. 



S40 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

were able to reconcile this piety with their war of aggres- 
sion. The faith of the Austrian Catholics must be ex- 
plained in relation to their crimes, if they were criminal, 
as we say they were, in leading the way to this war by 
their ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no re- 
straining influence upon the brutal instincts of those who 
profess and follow its faith, then surely it is time the world 
abandoned so ineffective a creed and turned to other laws 
likely to have more influence on human relationships. 
That, brutally, is the argument of the thinking world 
against the clergy of all nations who all claimed to be 
acting according to the justice of God and the spirit of 
Christ. It is a powerful argument, for the simple mind, 
rejecting casuistry, cuts straight to the appalling contrast 
between Christian profession and Christian practice, and 
says: **Here, in this war, there was no conflict between 
one faith and another, but a murderous death-struggle 
between many nations holding the same faith, preaching 
the same gospel, and claiming the same God as their pro- 
tector. Let us seek some better truth than that hypoc- 
risy! Let us, if need be, in honesty, get back to the sav- 
age worship of national gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe.'* 

My own belief is that the war was no proof against the 
Christian faith, but rather is a revelation that we are as 
desperately in need of the spirit of Christ as at any time 
in the history of mankind. But I think the clergy of all 
nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few, subordinated 
their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national limita- 
tions. They were patriots before they were priests, and 
their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as 
fierce, and as bloodthirsty as that of the people who 
looked to them for truth and light. They were often 
fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance than 
the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth 
that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and 
Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter 
long before the ending of the war, and would have made 
a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 541 

been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, 
and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many 
nations, under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up the 
fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting "in 
the cause of justice," "for the defense of the Fatherland,'* 
"for Christian righteousness," to the bitter end. Those 
words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book 
for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand. . . . 



VI 

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Rus- 
sian Revolution, followed by the collapse of the Russian 
armies and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for the fi.rst 
time the world heard the strange word "Bolshevism,'* 
and knew not what it meant. 

The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first 
years of the war, with an Oriental disregard of death. 
Under generals in German pay, betrayed by a widespread 
net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and 
armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on 
their way from one official to another, and never reached 
the front, so foul in callousness of human life that soldiers 
were put into the fighting-line without rifle or ammuni- 
tion, these Russian peasants flung themselves not once, 
but many times, against the finest troops of Germany, 
with no more than naked bayonets against powerful 
artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like 
sheep in the slaughter-houses of Chicago. Is it a wonder 
that at the last they revolted against this immolation, 
turned round upon their tyrants, and said: "You are the 
enemy. It is you that we will destroy"? 

By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of 
Germans. They said: "You are our brothers; we have 
no hatred against you. We do not want to kill you. 
Why should you kill us ^ We are all of us the slaves of 
bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. 



542 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

Do not shoot us, brothers, but join hands against the 
common tyranny which enslaves our peoples." They 
went forward with outstretched hands, and were shot 
down like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were 
not shot, because German soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at 
this new gospel, as it seemed, and said: "They speak 
words of truth. Why should we kill one another?" 

The German war lords ordered a forward movement, 
threatened their own men with death if they fraternized 
with Russians, and dictated their terms of peace on the 
old hnes of military conquest. But as LudendorfF has 
confessed, and as we now know from other evidence, 
many German soldiers were "infected" with Bolshevism 
and lost their fighting spirit. 

Russia was already in anarchy. Constitutional gov- 
ernment had been replaced by the Soviets and by com- 
mittees of soldiers and workmen. Kerensky had fled. 
Lenin and Trotzky were the Marat and Danton of the 
Revolution, and decreed the Reign of Terror. Tales of 
appalling atrocity, some true, some false (no one can tell 
how true or how false), came through to France and Eng- 
land. It was certain that the whole fabric of society in 
Russia had dissolved in the wildest anarchy the world 
has seen in modern times, and that the Bolshevik gospel 
of "brotherhood" with humanity was, at least, rudely 
"interrupted" by wholesale murder within its own 
boundaries. 

One other thing was certain. Having been relieved of 
the Russian menace, Germany was free to withdraw her 
armies on that front and use all her striking force in the 
west. It should have cautioned our generals to save 
their men for the greatest menace that had confronted 
them. But without caution they fought the battles of 
1917, in Flanders, as I have told. 

In 1917 and in the first half of 1918 there seemed no 
ending to the war by military means. Even many of 
our generals who had been so breezy in their optimism 
believed now that the end must come by diplomatic 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 543 

means — a ** peace by understanding." I had private 
talks with men in high command, who acknowledged 
that the way must be found, and the British mind pre- 
pared for negotiations, because there must come a limit 
to the drain of blood on each side. It was to one man 
in the world that many men in all armies looked for a 
way out of this frightful impasse. 

President Wilson had raised new hope among many 
men who otherwise were hopeless. He not only spoke 
high words, but defined the meanings of them. His defi- 
nition of liberty seemed sound and true, promising the 
self-determination of peoples. His oflPer to the German 
people to deal generously with them if they overthrew 
their tyranny raised no quarrel among British soldiers. 
His hope of a new diplomacy, based upon "open cove- 
nants openly arrived at," seemed to cut at the root of 
the old evil in Europe by which the fate of peoples had 
been in the hands of the few. His Fourteen Points set 
out clearly and squarely a just basis of peace. His advo- 
cacy of a League of Nations held out a vision of a new 
world by which the great and small democracies should be 
united by a common pledge to preserve peace and submit 
their differences to a supreme court of arbitration. Here 
at last was a leader of the world, with a clear call to the 
nobility in men rather than to their base passions, a gospel 
which would raise civilization from the depths into which 
it had fallen, and a practical remedy for that suicidal 
mania which was exhausting the combatant nations. 

I think there were many millions of men on each side 
of the fighting-line who thanked God because President 
Wilson had come with a wisdom greater than the folly 
which was ours to lead the way to an honorable peace 
and a new order of nations. I was one of them. . . . 
Months passed, and there was continual fighting, con- 
tinued slaughter, and no sign that ideas would prevail 
over forcCi The Germans launched their great offensive, 
broke through the British lines, and afterward through 
the French lines, and there were held and checked long 



544 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

enough for our reserves to be flung across the Channel — • 
300,000 boys from England and Scotland, who had been 
held in hand as the last counters for the pool. The Ameri- 
can army came in tidal waves across the Atlantic, flooded 
our back areas, reached the edge of the battlefields, were 
a new guaranty of strength. Their divisions passed 
mostly to the French front. With them, and with his 
own men, magnificent in courage still, and some of ours, 
Foch had his army of reserve, and struck. 

So the war ended, after all, by military force, and by 
military victory greater than had seemed imaginable or 
possible six months before. 

In the peace terms that followed there was but little 
trace of those splendid ideas which had been proclaimed 
by President Wilson. On one point after another he 
weakened, and was beaten by the old militarism which 
sat enthroned in the council-chamber, with its foot on 
the neck of the enemy. The "self-determination of peo- 
ples" was a hollow phrase signifying nothing. Open 
covenants openly arrived at were mocked by the closed 
doors of the Conference. When at last the terms were 
published their merciless severity, their disregard of 
racial boundaries, their creation of hatreds and vendettas 
which would lead, as sure as the sun should rise, to new 
warfare, staggered humanity, not only in Germany and 
Austria, but in every country of the world, where at least 
minorities of people had hoped for some nobler vision of 
the world's needs, and for some healing remedy for the 
evils which had massacred its youth. The League of 
Nations, which had seemed to promise so well, was 
hedged round by limitations which made it look bleak 
and barren. Still it was peace, and the rivers of blood 
had ceased to flow, and the men were coming home again. 
. . . Home again! 

VII 

The men came home in a queer mood, startling to those 
who had not watched them "out there," and to those who 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 545 

welcomed peace with flags. Even before their home- 
coming, which was delayed week after week, month after 
month, unless they were lucky young miners out for the 
victory push and back again quickly, strange things 
began to happen in France and Flanders, Egypt and 
Palestine. Men who had been long patient became sud- 
denly impatient. Men who had obeyed all discipline 
broke into disobedience bordering on mutiny. They 
elected spokesmen to represent their grievances, like 
trade-unionists. They "answered back" to their officers 
in such large bodies, with such threatening anger, that it 
was impossible to give them "Field Punishment Number 
One," or any other number, especially as their battalion 
officers sympathized mainly with their point of view. 
They demanded demobilization according to their terms 
of service, which was for " the duration of the war." They 
protested against the gross inequalities of selection by 
which men of short service were sent home before those 
who had been out in 1914, 1915, 1916. They demanded 
justness, fair play, and denounced red tape and official 
lies. "We want to go home!" was their shout on parade. 
A serious business, subversive of discipline. 

Similar explosions were happening in England. Bodies 
of men broke camp at Folkestone and other camps, dem- 
onstrated before town halls, demanded to speak with 
mayors, generals, any old fellows who were in authority, 
and refused to embark for France until they had definite 
pledges that they would receive demobilization papers 
without delay. Whitehall, the sacred portals of the War 
Office, the holy ground of the Horse Guards' Parade, were 
invaded by bodies of men who had commandeered am- 
bulances and lorries and had made long journeys from 
their depots. They, too, demanded demobilization. They 
refused to be drafted out for service to India, Egypt, 
Archangel, or anywhere. They had "done their bit," 
according to their contract. It was for the War Office to 
fulfil its pledges. "Justice" was the word on their lips, 
and it was a word v/hich put the wind up (as soldiers say) 



546 NOW i IT CAN BE TOLD 

any staff-officers and officials who had not studied the 
laws of justice as they concern private soldiers, and who 
had dealt with them after the armistice and after the 
peace as they had dealt with them before — as numbers, 
counters to be shifted here and there according to the 
needs of the High Command. What was this strange word 
"justice** on soldiers' lips? . . . Red tape squirmed and 
writhed about the business of demobilization. Orders 
were made, communicated to the men, canceled even at 
the railway gates. Promises were made and broken. 
Conscripts were drafted off to India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, 
Archangel, against their will and contrary to pledge. 
Men on far fronts, years absent from their wives and 
homes, were left to stay there, fever-stricken, yearning 
for home, despairing. And while the old war was not 
yet cold in its grave we prepared for a new war against 
Bolshevik Russia, arranging for the spending of more 
miUions, the sacrifice of more boys of ours, not openly, 
with the consent of the people, but on the sly, with a fine 
art of camouflage. 

The purpose of the new war seemed to many men who 
had fought for "liberty" an outrage against the "self- 
determination of peoples" which had been the funda- 
mental promise of the League of Nations, and a blatant 
hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self- 
government to Ireland. The ostensible object of our in- 
tervention in Russia was to liberate the Russian masses 
from "the bloody tyranny of the Bolsheviks," but this 
ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been manifest 
during the reign of Czardom and grand dukes when 
there were massacres of mobs in Moscow, bloody Sundays 
in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings of men and 
girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas, 
and democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack 
knout and by the torture of Siberian exile. 

Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our 
business to suppress the Russian Revolution or to punish 
the leaders of it, and it was suspected by British working- 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 547 

men that the real motive behind our action was not a 
noble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to establish 
a reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a 
philosophy of life more dangerous to the old order in 
Europe than high explosives, and to get back the gold that 
had been poured into Russia by England and France. 
By a strange paradox of history, French journalists, for- 
getting their own Revolution, the cruelties of Robespierre 
and Marat, the September Massacres, the torture of 
Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries, the guillotining of 
many fair women of France, and after 1870 the terrors of 
the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in 
Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the bloody 
struggle by which a people made mad by long oppres- 
sion and infernal tyrannies strove to gain the liberties 
of Hfe. 

Thousands of British soldiers newly come from war in 
France were sullenly determined that they would not be 
dragged off to the new adventure. They were not alone. 
As Lord Rothermere pointed out, a French regiment 
mutinied on hearing a mere unfounded report that it was 
being sent to the Black Sea. The United States and 
Japan were withdrawing. Only a few of our men, dis- 
illusioned by the ways of peace, missing the old comrade- 
ship of the ranks, restless, purposeless, not happy at 
home, seeing no prospect of good employment, said: 
"Hell! . . . Why not the army again, and Archangel, or 
any old where?" and volunteered for Mr. Winston 
Churchill's little war. 

After the trouble of demobilization came peace pageants 
and celebrations and flag-wavings. But all was not right 
with the spirit of the men who came back. Something 
was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked 
to their mothers and wives very much like the young men 
who had gone to business in the peaceful days before the 
August of *I4. But they had not come back the same 
men. Something had altered in them. They were sub- 
ject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound de- 



548 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

pression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. 
Many of them were easily moved to passion when they 
lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their 
speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time, 
while they drew their unemployment pensions, they did 
not make any effort to get work for the future. They 
said: "That can wait. I've done my bit. The country 
can keep me for a while. I helped to save it. . . . Let's go 
to the 'movies.'", They were listless when not excited 
by some "show." Something seemed to have snapped 
in them; their will-power. A quiet day at home did not 
appeal to them. 

"Are you tired of me?" said the young wife, wistfully. 
"Aren't you glad to be home.?" 

"It's a dull sort of life," said some of them. 

The boys, unmarried, hung about street - corners, 
searched for their pals, formed clubs where they smoked 
incessantly, and talked in an aimless way. 

Then began the search for work. Boys without train- 
ing looked for jobs with wages high enough to give them 
a margin for amusement, after the cost of living decently 
had been reckoned on the scale of high prices, mounting 
higher and higher. Not so easy as they had expected. 
The girls were clinging to their jobs, would not let go of 
the pocket-money which they had spent on frocks. Em- 
ployers favored girl labor, found it efficient and, on the 
whole, cheap. Young soldiers v/ho had been very skilled 
with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found 
that they vv^ere classed with the ranks of unskilled labor 
in civil life. That was not good enough. They had fought 
for their country. They had served England. Now they 
wanted good jobs with short hours and good wages. 
They meant to get them. And meanwhile prices were 
rising in the shops. Suits of clothes, boots, food, any- 
thing, were at double and treble the price of pre-war days. 
The profiteers were rampant. They were out to bleed 
the men who had been fighting. They were defrauding 
the public with sheer, undisguised robbery, and the gov- 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 549 

ernment did nothing to check them. England, they 
thought, was rotten all through. 

Who cared for the men who had risked their lives and 
bore on their bodies the scars of war? The pensions doled 
out to blinded soldiers would not keep them aHve. The 
consumptives, the gassed, the paralyzed, were forgotten 
in institutions where they lay hidden from the public eye. 
Before the war had been over six months "our heroes," 
"our brave boys in the trenches" were without preference 
in the struggle for existence. 

Employers of labor gave them no special consideration. 
In many offices they were told bluntly (as I know) that 
they had "wasted" three or four years in the army and 
could not be of the same value as boys just out of school. 
The officer class was hardest hit in that way. They had 
gone straight from the public schools and universities to 
the army. They had been lieutenants, captains, and 
majors in the air force, or infantry battalions, or tanks, 
or trench-mortars, and they had drawn good pay, which 
was their pocket-money. Now they were at a loose end, 
hating the idea of office-work, but ready to knuckle down 
to any kind of decent job with some prospect ahead. 
What kind of job? What knowledge had they of use in 
civil life? None. They scanned advertisements, an- 
swered likely invitations, were turned down by elderly 
men who said: "I've had two hundred applications. 
And none of you young gentlemen from the army are fit 
to be my office-boy." They were the same elderly men 
who had said: "We'll fight to the last ditch. If I had 
six sons I would sacrifice them all in the cause of liberty 
and justice." 

Elderly officers who had lost their businesses for their 
country's sake, who with a noble devotion had given up 
everything to "do their bit," paced the streets searching 
for work, and were shown out of every office where they 
applied for a post. I know one officer of good family 
and distinguished service who hawked round a subscrip- 
tion-book to private houses. It took him more courage 
36 



5SO NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

than he had needed under shell-fire to ring the bell and 
ask to see "the lady of the house." He thanked God 
every time the maid handed back his card and said, "Not 
at home." On the first week's work he was four pounds 
out of pocket. . . . Here and there an elderly officer blew 
out his brains. Another sucked a rubber tube fastened 
to the gas-jet. ... It would have been better if they had 
fallen on the field of honor. 

Where was the nation's gratitude for the men who had 
fought and died, or fought and lived.? Was it for this 
reward in peace that nearly a million of our men gave up 
their lives? That question is not my question. It is 
the question that was asked by millions of men in England 
in the months that followed the armistice, and it was 
answered in their own brains by a bitterness and indigna- 
tion out of which may be lit the fires of the revolutionary 
spirit. 

At street-corners, in tramway cars, in tea-shops where 
young men talked at the table next to mine I listened to 
conversations not meant for my ears, which made me 
hear in imagination and afar off (yet not very far, per- 
haps) the dreadful rumble of revolution, the violence of 
mobs led by fanatics. It was the talk, mostly, of de- 
mobilized soldiers. They asked one another, "What 
did we fight for?" and then other questions such as, 
"Wasn't this a war for Hberty?" or, "We fought for 
the land, didn't we? Then why shouldn't we share 
the land?" Or, "Why should we be bled white by 
profiteers?" 

They mentioned the government, and then laughed in 
a scornful way. 

"The government," said one man, "is a conspiracy 
against the people. All its power is used to protect those 
who grow fat on big jobs, big trusts, big contracts. It 
used us to smash the German Empire in order to strengthen 
and enlarge the British Empire for the sake of those who 
grab the oil-wells, the gold-fields, the minerals, and the 
markets of the world." 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 551 

VIII 

Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will 
not be averted by pretending that such words are not 
being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething 
among our working-classes. It will only be averted by 
cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our 
political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, 
strong call of noble-minded men to a new way of life in 
which a great people believing in the honor and honesty 
of its leadership and in fair reward for good labor shall 
face a period of poverty with courage, and co-operate 
unselfishly for the good of the commonwealth, inspired 
by a sense of fellowship with the workers of other nations. 
We have a long way to go and many storms to weather 
before we reach that state, if, by any grace that is in us, 
and above us, we reach it. 

For there are disease and insanity in our present state, 
due to the travail of the war and the education of the war. 
The daily newspapers for many months have been filled 
with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and passion. 
Most of them have been done by soldiers or ex-soldiers. 
The attack on the poHce station at Epsom, the destruc- 
tion of the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of 
passion, a murderous instinct, which have been mani- 
fested again and again in other riots and street rows and 
solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they 
are not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, 
or any mob passion, but by homicidal mania and secret 
lust. The many murders of young women, the outrages 
upon little girls, the violent robberies that have happened 
since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled decent- 
minded people. They cannot understand the cause of 
this epidemic after a period when there was less crime 
than usual. 

The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the 
discipline and training of modern warfare. Our armies, 
as all armies, established an intensive culture of brutality. 



552 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

They were schools of slaughter. It was the duty of 
officers like Col. Ronald Campbell — "O. C. Bayonets" 
(a delightful man) — to inspire blood-lust in the brains of 
gentle boys who instinctively disliked butcher's work. 
By an ingenious system of psychology he played upon 
their nature, calling out the primitive barbarism which 
has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating the 
brute which has been long chained up by law and the 
social code of gentle life, but lurks always in the secret 
lairs of the human heart. It is difficult when the brute 
has been unchained, for the purpose of kiUing Germans, 
to get it into the collar again with a cry of, "Down, dog, 
down!" Generals, as I have told, were against the "soft 
stuff" preached by parsons, who were not quite militar- 
ized, though army chaplains. They demanded the gospel 
of hate, not that of love. But hate, when it dominates 
the psychology of men, is not restricted to one objective, 
such as a body of men behind barbed wire. It is a 
spreading poison. It envenoms the whole mind. Like 
jealousy 

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock 
The meat it feeds on. 

Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were 
taught the ancient code of the jungle law, to track down 
human beasts in No Man's Land, to jump upon their 
bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly, silently, in a raid, 
to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with 
men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours 
in a shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, 
to bludgeon their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of 
steel, to get at his throat if need be with nails and teeth. 
The code of the ape-man is bad for some temperaments. 
It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up 
again when there are no Germans present, but some old 
woman behind an open till, or some policeman with a 
bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in a street riot 
where fellow-citizens are for the time being "the enemy." 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 553 

Death, their own or other people*s, does not mean very 
much to some who, in the trenches, sat within a few yards 
of stinking corpses, knowing that the next shell might 
make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is it not 
cheap in peace? . . . 

The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed 
discipline — mechanical, and enforced in the last resort 
not by reason, but by field punishment or by a firing 
platoon. Whereas many men were made brisk and alert 
by discipline and saw the need of it for the general good, 
others were always in secret rebellion against its restraints 
of the individual will, and as soon as they were liberated 
broke away from it as slaves from their chains, and did 
not substitute self-discipline for that which had weighed 
heavy on them. With all its discipline, army life was full 
of lounging, hanging about, waste of time, waiting for 
things to happen. It was an irresponsible life for the 
rank and file. Food was brought to them, clothes were 
given to them, entertainments were provided behind the 
line, sports organized, their day ordered by high powers. 
There was no need to think for themselves, to act for them- 
selves. They moved in herds dependent on their leaders. 
That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of civil 
life. It tended to destroy personal initiative and will- 
power. Another evil of the abnormal life of war sowed 
the seeds of insanity in the brains of men not strong enough 
to resist it. Sexually they were starved. For months 
they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But 
they came back into villages or towns where they were 
tempted by any poor slut who winked at them and in- 
fected them with illness. Men went to hospital with 
venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined 
and poisoned for life. Future generations will pay the 
price of war not only in poverty and by the loss of the 
unborn children of the boys who died, but by an enfeebled 
stock and the heritage of insanity. 

The Prime Minister said one day, "The world is suffer- 
ing from shell-shock." That was true. But it suffered 



554 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

also from the symptoms of all that illness which comes 
from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is war. 

The majority of our men were clean-living and clean- 
hearted fellows who struggled to come unscathed in soul 
from most of the horrors of war. They resisted the edu- 
cation of brutahty and were not envenomed by the gospel 
of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they 
looked up to the light, and had visions of some better law 
of life than that which led to the world-tragedy. It 
would be a foul libel on many of them to besmirch their 
honor by a general accusation of lowered morality and 
brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race 
and in the quality of our home life kept great numbers 
of them sound, chivalrous, generous-hearted, in spite of 
the frightful influences of degradation bearing down upon 
them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the 
weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were 
overwhelmed by these influences, and all that was base 
in them was intensified, and their passions were unleashed, 
with what result we have seen, and shall see, to our sor- 
row and the nation's peril. 

The nation was in great peril after this war, and that 
peril will not pass in our lifetime except by heroic reme- 
dies. We won victory in the field and at the cost of our 
own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria and Tur- 
key, but the structure of our own wealth and industry 
was shattered, and the very foundations of our power 
were shaken and sapped. Nine months after the armis- 
tice Great Britain was spending at the rate of £2,000,000 
a day in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with 
a national debt which had risen from 645 millions in 1914 
to 7,800 millions in 1919. The pre-war expenditure of 
£200,000,000 per annum on the navy, army, and civil 
service pensions and interest on national debt had risen 
to 750 millions. 

Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased 
output, so that foreign exchanges were rising against us 
and the American dollar was increasing in value as our 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 555' 

proud old sovereign was losing its ancient standard. So 
that for all imports from the United States we were pay- 
ing higher prices, which rose every time the rate of ex- 
change dropped against us. The slaughter of 900,000 
men of ours, the disablement of many more than that, 
had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a paralysis of 
all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery 
for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the 
crippling effect of high taxation, the rise in wages to meet 
high prices, and the lethargy of the workers. Ruin, im- 
mense, engulfing, annihilating to our strength as a nation 
and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes at the 
time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the 
thought that other nations in Europe, including the Ger- 
man people, are in the same desperate plight, or worse. 

IX 

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil 
that has overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that 
is not without a strange splendor, like a ship that goes 
down with drums beating and banners flying, we are 
racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are 
sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have 
extended the responsibilities of empire and of world- 
power as though we had illimitable wealth. Our sphere 
of influence includes Persia, Thibet, Arabia, Palestine, 
Egypt — a vast part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if 
any part of our possessions were to break into revolt or 
raise a *'holy war" against us, we should be hard pressed 
for men to uphold our power and prestige, and our treas- 
ury would be called upon in vain for gold. After the war 
which was to crush militarism the air force alone pro- 
posed an annual expenditure of more than twice as much 
money as the whole cost of the army before the war. 
While the armaments of the German people, whom we 
defeated in the war against militarism, are restricted to 
a few warships and a navy of 100,000 men at a cost reck- 



556 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

oned as £10,000,000 a year, we are threatened with a 
naval and military program costing £300,000,000 a year. 
Was it for this our men fought? Was it to estabhsh a 
new imperialism upheld by the power of guns that 900,000 
boys of ours died in the war of liberation? I know it was 
otherwise. There are people at the street-corners who 
know; and in the tram-cars and factories and little houses 
in mean streets where there are empty chairs and the 
portraits of dead boys. 

It will go hard with the government of England if it 
plays a grandiose drama before hostile spectators who 
refuse to take part in it. It will go hard with the nation, 
for it will be engulfed in anarchy. 

At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I 
write these words, five years after another August, this 
England of ours, this England which I love because its 
history is in my soul and its blood is in my body, and I 
have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto death. 
Only great physicians may heal it, and its old vitality 
struggling against disease, and its old sanity against in- 
sanity. Our Empire is greater now in spaciousness than 
ever before, but our strength to hold it has ebbed low 
because of much death, and a strain too long endured, 
and stranghng debts. The workman is tired and has 
slackened in his work. In his scheme of life he desires 
more luxury than our poverty affords. He wants higher 
wages, shorter hours, and less output — reasonable desires 
in our state before the war, unreasonable now because 
the cost of the war has put them beyond human possi- 
bility. He wants low prices with high wages and less 
work. It is false arithmetic and its falsity will be proved 
by a tremendous crash. 

Some crash must come, tragic and shocking to our 
social structure. I see no escape from that, and only the 
hope that in that crisis the very shock of it will restore 
the mental balance of the nation and that all classes will 
combine under leaders of unselfish purpose, and fine vision, 
eager for evolution and not revolution, for peace and not 



FOR WHAT MEN DIED 557 

for blood, for Christian charity and not for hatred, for 
civiHzation and not for anarchy, to reshape the conditions 
of our social hfe and give us a new working order, with 
more equality of labor and reward, duty and sacrifice, 
liberty and discipline of the soul, combining the virtue of 
patriotism with a generous spirit to other peoples across 
the old frontiers of hate. That is the hope but not the 
certainty. 

It is only by that hope that one may look back upon 
the war with anything but despair. All the lives of those 
boys whom I saw go marching up the roads of France 
and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid, so lovely 
in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their 
sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little 
higher than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. 
They will have been betrayed if the agony they suffered 
is forgotten and **the war to end war" leads to prepara- 
tions for new, more monstrous conflict. 

Or is war the law of human life? Is there something 
more powerful than kaisers and castes which drives 
masses of men against other masses in death-struggles 
which they do not understand ? Are we really poor beasts 
in the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity 
and poison-gas, for the survival of the fittest in an endless 
conflict ? If that is so, then God mocks at us. Or, rather, 
if that is so, there is no God such as we men may love, 
with love for men. 

The world will not accept that message of despair; and 
millions of men to-day who went through the agony of the 
war are inspired by the humble belief that humanity may 
be cured of its cruelty and stupidity, and that a brother- 
hood of peoples more powerful than a League of Nations 
may be founded in the world after its present sickness 
and out of the conflict of its anarchy. 

That is the new vision which leads men on, and if we 
can make one step that way it will be better than that 
backward fall which civilization took when Germany 
played the devil and led us all into the jungle. The devil 



558 NOW IT CAN BE TOLD 

in Germany had to be killed. There was no other way, 
except by helping the Germans to kill it before it mas- 
tered them. Now let us exorcise our own devils and get 
back to kindness toward all men of good will. That also 
is the only way to heal the heart of the world and our own 
state. Let us seek the beauty of hfe and God's truth 
somehow, remembering the boys who died too soon, and 
all the falsity and hatred of these past five years. By 
blood and passion there will be no healing. We have 
seen too much blood. We want to wipe it out of our eyes 
and souls. Let us have Peace. 



THE END 



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